Emily Estefan scores her first ballet as she and Patricia Delgado open Miami City Ballet's season

October 15, 2026

Two Cuban-American artists who grew up in Miami are front and center as Miami City Ballet opens its 2026-27 season. Choreographer Patricia Delgado, a former principal dancer with the company and a 2025 Tony winner for her choreography of Buena Vista Social Club, premieres Push the Buttons of the Civilized, her first commission for a ballet company, set to original music by Emily Estefan, the daughter of Gloria and Emilio Estefan. It is also Estefan's first venture into dance.

The piece anchors the American Rhythms program, running October 16-18 at Miami's Adrienne Arsht Center and October 24-25 at the Broward Center in Fort Lauderdale, alongside George Balanchine's Allegro Brillante and the company premiere of Jerome Robbins' N.Y. Export: Opus Jazz, with new costumes by Zac Posen for GapStudio. Estefan will be onstage singing and playing guitar and drums while her band plays in the orchestra pit.

The title comes from a lyric on Take Whatever You Want, the debut album Estefan wrote at 18 and released in 2017, and the songs were orchestrated by the company's music director, Gary Sheldon. "I'm even including pieces I haven't released yet," she told ArtburstMiami. The ballet opens with a parental pas de deux that, Delgado said, grew partly out of thinking about her own mother and what it meant to leave Cuba with a child. Estefan also brought in a recording of a lullaby sung by her grandmother, Gloria Fajardo.

The two met while working on Basura, the musical with music by Gloria and Emily Estefan that Delgado choreographed and that premiered in May at Atlanta's Alliance Theatre. Miami City Ballet artistic director Gonzalo Garcia, who proposed the collaboration, said he wanted to make a point about "the value of ballets made in Miami."