Miami City Ballet Enters Its Shining Moment Under the Direction of Lourdes Lopez

Miami City Ballet might only carry Miami in its name, but the company actually serves South Florida’s tri-county area: Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach, as well as Collier County (Naples) on Florida’s West Coast. That’s a lot of ground to cover for one classical ballet company, which comes with a lot of responsibility to such expansive and diverse communities. Even so, Miami City Ballet has not only survived, but in the last two seasons has begun to thrive like never before.

For the last few seasons, Miami City Ballet (MCB) has been in a period of transition, a transformation if you will, and a seamless one at that. A transformation that has been unsurprisingly effective in reinventing the company and catapulting it to the world-class ballet company that it has always been on the verge of becoming. The arrival of Lourdes Lopez in 2012, as well as a complete overhaul of the company’s branding and business model, has reinvigorated an organization that only about five years ago was beginning to be a blur to Miami audiences. Not that MCB was ever going to fade away, that would be inconceivable in a city that’s finally starting to make breakthroughs in its cultural renaissance and vying for that world-class city title, but it seems as if Miami’s arts companies have to scream emergency before real changes are made internally that will allow these organizations to not only stay alive, but flourish.