Cleveland Ballet (founded 2014)

In October 2015, Cleveland Ballet's inaugural season debuted with the ballet Past. Present. Future. at Playhouse Square, characterized by a reviewer as "respectable, if a bit shaky".[8] The company continued with a production of Coppélia in May 2016, described as "evidence of a company eager and able to do great things", with the dancers' performances as "mostly excellent".[9]

By its second season, 2016–2017, the ballet had grown to fourteen members.[10] It concluded the season with a performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream, which was reviewed as featuring "smartly-crafted, deceptively difficult, and wonderfully illustrative choreography".[10]

Cleveland Ballet became Playhouse Square's resident classical ballet company in 2017, during its third season.[7] This designation resulted in additional marketing funds, access to more rehearsal space, and priority in scheduling.[7]

In 2017, Cleveland Ballet also reintroduced regular holiday performances of Tchaikovsky's ballet, The Nutcracker, as a seasonal tradition in Cleveland—the first Nutcracker production by a local company at Playhouse Square since 1999.[11] Additional performances of the season included the 1909 ballet, Les Sylphides,[12] as well as Alice, a new ballet based on Lewis Carroll's book Alice in Wonderland.[13]

In the fourth season, 2018–2019, the company increased to 20 professional dancers.[14] In addition to The Nutcracker, Cleveland Ballet presented Fall Collection and Coppélia as main stage productions at Playhouse Square.[15][16][17]

In its fifth season, 2019–2020, the ballet grew to 25 dancers, performing Carmen at the Ohio Theatre in October [18] and offering 12 performances of The Nutcracker at the Hanna Theatre in December.[19] The season was cut short by the COVID-19 pandemic in Spring 2020, requiring the cancellation of the company's planned performance of Mozart's The Magic Flute.[20]