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Houston Ballet will launch the busiest half of its 50th anniversary season in February with purely classical “The Sleeping Beauty,” but it also is ready to look forward. Most of the works for the company’s 2020-21 season, announced Sunday, are contemporary or neoclassical.

The line-up adds three contemporary one-act ballets to the repertoire, with fewer premieres than in recent seasons.

A new one-act commission for principal ballerina Melody Mennite, the season’s sole world premiere, offers a clear endorsement of her promise as a choreographer. Mennite created “Oh, There You Are” for Houston Ballet’s one-night Jubilee of Dance in 2018 and also collaborated with Oliver Halkowich and Connor Walsh to create “What We Keep” earlier that year.

Recent ballets by William Forsythe and Justin Peck, both of whom have built good relationships with the company, also will be new to Houston’s dancers and audience.

Forsythe’s “Blake Works I,” made in 2016 for Paris Opera Ballet, is a fast, directionally-dynamic neoclassical work for a large ensemble, set to seven tracks from British electro-pop composer James Blake’s album “The Colour in Anything.” He offers an intriguingly cryptic explanation in the Paris company’s program: “I like to make uncertain what takes place on stage and to extend what I call the poetry of disappearance.”

Peck returns with “Heatscape,” a buzzy collaboration with visual artist Shepard Fairey that merges ballet, guerilla street art and the music of Czech composer Bohuslav Martinů. The production was created for Miami City Ballet in 2015.

In the all-important full-length department, Sir Kenneth MacMillan’s “Mayerling” will get a better second ride at the Wortham Theater Center. Houston Ballet was the first U.S. company granted the right to perform that 1978 masterpiece, but its first run was shortened after Hurricane Harvey and presented at the Smart Financial Centre in Sugar Land.

Demanding theatrically and physically, with a score by Franz Liszt, the ballet gives featured roles to a number of dancers as it follows the story of Crown Prince Rudolph, sole heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the late 19th century, through an unhappy marriage and dalliances that eventually lead to his death alongside a 17-year-old mistress, Baroness Mary Vetsera.

David Bintley’s “Aladdin” and Welch’s “La Bayadère” are spectactular productions drawn from colorful cultural references, to vastly different effect – one comic family fare, the other tragic and classical. “Aladdin,” with a score by Carl Davis, is rich with special effects and Dick Bird’s eye-dazzling sets (most memorably, a cave with stairs resembling a woolly mammoth’s skeleton). “LaBayadere” is a somewhat rare full treatment of a Ludwig Minkus ballet that contains an oft-performed and cherished white tutu scene. Its Kingdom of the Shades section begins with a solemn procession down a ramp in which all the ballerinas hop forward in arabesque – one of the most kinetically thrilling moments in all ballet.

The season opens a little off-tradition with a mixed-rep evening – a smart strategy, considering that the first performances fall in early September, at the height of Houston’s hurricane threat season. That doesn’t make it any less exciting: Along with the Forsythe premiere and artistic director Stanton Welch’s funny “The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra,” the company revisits a gem it has not performed in a decade, George Balanchine’s “Rubies.”

Other mixed-rep programs offer the enticing returns of Wayne McGregor’s “Dyad 1929,” a stunning tribute to modern dance icon Merce Cunningham; Christopher Bruce’s fun “Rooster,” a romp to Rolling Stones songs; and two of Welch’s best one acts, the strikingly sharp “Divergence,” with its stiff black tutus and earthy-dramatic “The Right of Spring.”

Here’s how the schedule plays out:

Sept. 11-20: “Rubies” (Balanchine), “Blake Works I” (Forsythe), “The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra (Welch)

Sept. 24-Oct. 4: “Mayerling” (MacMillan)

Nov. 27-Dec. 27: “The Nutcracker” (Welch)*

Dec. 4: Margaret Alkek Williams Jubilee of Dance*

Feb. 25-March 7, 2021: “La Bayadère” (Welch)

March 11-21, 2021: “Heatscape” (Peck), “Rooster” (Bruce), “Divergence” (Welch)

April 30-May 1, 2021: Academy Spring Showcase*

May 27-June 6, 2021: “Dyad 1929” (McGregor), “The Rite of Spring” (Welch), Mennite world premiere

June 10-20, 2021: “Aladdin” (Bintley)

*Add-ons

Season ticket packages $114-$1,248; 713-227-2787, houstonballet.org.

molly.glentzer@chron.com