Gonzalo García goes to Miami
where, it has just been announced, he will become the new leader of Miami City Ballet
It has been announced that Gonzalo García is to be the next artistic director of Miami City Ballet, following in the footsteps of Lourdes Lopes and Edward Villella. Those are big footsteps to fill. It's heartening to see that the Balanchine / Robbins backbone will still be at the heart of the company—after all, it is part of its DNA. I'm also happy that García is a Spanish speaker—he is a Spaniard, from Zaragoza. Miami is after all a Spanish-speaking city; I often think of it as the capital of Latin America and have found that one can spend days there without ever resorting to speaking English. He was a member of San Francisco Ballet from 1998-2007, and of New York City Ballet from 2007-2022. I have admired his dancing, especially in "Opus 19: The Dreamer," "Apollo," and "Suite of Dances." He was in the first cast of Alexei Ratmansky's "Concerto DSCH," in which he, Ashley Bouder, and Joaquin de Luz duked it out for the top prize in speed, bravura and sense of fun. His lyricism and his port de bras are two qualities I've always appreciated in his dancing. Since 2022 he has been a ballet master at New York City Ballet. He gives off the air of an affable, joyous person. In 2019 I watched him rehearse Jerome Robbins's "A Suite of Dances," and wrote about it for the New Yorker:
