Miami City Ballet Trip!

Last weekend I took a quick trip to the Miami area to see Miami City Ballet! My friend, Kristin, went with me and we soaked up ~72 hours of sunshine and palm trees. It was glorious!

We took a really early flight Saturday morning so we could spend the majority of our day in Miami before going up to West Palm Beach where the ballet performance was on Sunday. We grabbed lunch at a sushi place and then headed straight for the beach. It had been years since I'd been to a warm beach and I felt so nostalgic for my childhood summers with my grandparents in Florida!

Later on we headed in to Miami Beach to check out the sites and the architecture. We saw the Miami City Ballet building (sooo cool) and, unexpectedly, one the Seven Magic Mountains sculptures in a park across the street! After dinner we had some time to kill before our tour at the Museum of Ice Cream so we wandered into the Faena hotel. My gosh was this place cool! There was a neat gold dinosaur bone installation by the outdoor bar, and a nice view of the sunset we had to capture!

I've been seeing photos from the Museum of Ice Cream in my Instagram feed for awhile, so when the Miami location said it would be extending its stay, we jumped at the chance to see what this is all about! It's definitely not a museum, but just a fun place to take cute photos. If you can embrace it for what it is, it's a fun time!

We're not much for the club scene these days, so we headed up to West Palm Beach after the museum to get some rest at our adorable Airbnb! Sunday morning we enjoyed breakfast at a Swedish coffee house and quickly realized the vibe in West Palm was more our style compared to Miami lol. The coffee house was in a residential area a block away from the beach and we saw so many doggies being walked! We could have spent all morning greeting dogs and sipping on coffee :)

We decided we should see more of Palm Beach before the ballet, so we headed over to the Worth Ave shopping district and pretty much had it to ourselves since the shops weren't open yet. This was the most charming shopping area and I would for sure come back here to do a photo shoot or, you know, just pop into Jimmy Choo... :)

Now, THE BALLET! We saw Program Three which started with Balanchine's Theme & Variations, followed by a new Brian Brooks contemporary piece called One Line Drawn, and finishing with Robbins' The Concert! Basically this entire trip was planned around seeing The Concert because it has been one of my favorite ballets to watch clips of online! I had really been wanting to see it in its entirety, and a bonus if done so at a Balanchine company, so when I saw MCB was doing it, plans were made!

I had never seen Theme & Variations, but knowing it's a Balanchine ballet I knew I'd like it. And omg, did I like it. Pull up the Tchaikovsky music right now (fourth movement of Suite No. 3) and you can probably imagine all the crazy fast footwork as the music builds at the end!

The new contemporary piece was really cool - the lighting made me instantly wish I was photographing it, and the concept was really neat. The men and women were in the same costumes and the gender roles were mixed. At one point a women behind us whispered to her husband that she finally realized there were two men dancing together and not a man and a women. Pretty cool!

So, during The Concert, I got really emotional! I kept thinking about how much my mom would enjoy seeing this ballet (it's about a piano concert and my mom's a pianist) and I think I was also just overwhelmed with the talent on stage and that I had made this trip happen that was just a faint idea around Christmas. Being on my period probably helped my highly emotional state haha, but nonetheless, I found myself tearing up from happiness. And laughter - this ballet is a humorous one! I want to get some ballet ladies together and learn The Mistake Waltz portion with the six female dancers!

After the ballet we were hit hard with the tired stick. The 5am flight the previous day and then losing an hour traveling east had caught up with us! We stopped at Subculture Coffee nearby to give us the caffeine boost we needed for the drive back down to Miami Beach. We drove along the coast, gawking at the incredibly beautiful homes, and then stopped in Ft. Lauderdale for dinner with a relative of Kristin's. I had a delicious margartia and mahi tacos!

We had booked another Airbnb in Miami that night, but long story short, we didn't feel safe staying there once we got there so we booked a hotel stay last minute. Shout out to the Hilton Miami Beach for being awesome and nice. We also learned that Airbnbs are illegal on Miami Beach??! So take note of that and book a hotel stay if you're going there!

The next morning we got up early to meet a corps dancer with Miami City Ballet for a photo shoot! I had done a call out on my Instagram and it worked out to meet with Alaina Andersen! My gosh was she beautiful! I love doing shoots when I travel because it's fun to meet new dancers and come up with ideas in new locations! I had never been to Miami, much less this location, or met this dancer and we shot some of my favorite stuff to date!

After the shoot Kristin and I grabbed brunch at Morgan's in Wynwood and then had 20 mintues to run around Wynwood Walls before I needed to take Kristin to the airport!

I had a couple hours to kill before my evening flight so I headed to the beach, called my mom, and walked along the water as we talked for an hour! :) My mom is actually living in Florida right now, but too far away to make it down to see me for a day. But, I will be back in Florida in a couple weeks to visit her, my step-dad, and my grandparents! My husband and my sister are also coming so I am really looking forward to the family time. It has been too long!

I hope you guys have enjoyed this lengthy travel blog post! I was going to vlog this trip, but just didn't have the energy for it once we got there and I didn't want to put pressure on myself to create if it wasn't coming naturally to me. Hence the huge collection of photos :)

Let me know if you'd like to hear more about "ballet tourism" -- traveling for ballet. It's a topic I'd love to write more about!

Jana