Maldonado-López teaching jazz at Miami City Ballet School

As instructor for jazz and contemporary techniques at Miami City Ballet School and a jazz and ballet for music theater teacher at New World School of the Arts, Rafi Maldonado-López thinks he has the best of both worlds. “I come to New World and I have all my Broadway babies,” he says, “and then I go down the street and I have all of my concert dance babies.” Though this means his lesson plans don’t necessarily have a lot of overlap—his dancers at MCB are “lithe and beautiful thoroughbreds,” and his New World students are music theater kids, focused on becoming triple threats—Maldonado-López relishes the opportunity to expand the worlds of both groups. At MCB, his jazz and modern classes give the dancers a leg up when it comes to the contemporary choreography that’s thrown at them more and more often. At New World, he’s giving his students another chance to explore characterization: “When you work with music theater kids,” he says, “they want to know, ‘What am I exuding in this toward the audience? What’s the story I’m telling?’”

Maldonado-López’s own training was an amalgam of dance and theater: He apprenticed with Ballets de San Juan and studied at the Joffrey Ballet School and The Boston Conservatory before crossing over to the more contemporary Minnesota Dance Theatre and Ballet of the Dolls, a dance theater group. This eclectic education has made his daily trip from bunheads to gypsies an easy one—though he doesn’t really think there’s too big of a difference between the two. “The hair at New World is not in a bun. They work the hairography, as I call it,” he laughs. “That’s the real difference.” DT