Amador brings hustle, confidence to role as ballet’s artistic director

Devoted to dance and to the company

From the moment he arrived at the Cincinnati Ballet studios in 2004, it was evident that Cervilio Miguel Amador would have an impact on the company.

Just how much of an impact, no one knew.

He was just 20 years old. He couldn’t speak English. Just months earlier, he had defected while on a U.S. tour with the Ballet Nacional de Cuba. 

“I don’t think he even knew how to say ‘Hello’ or ‘My name is . . . ’ ” recalled Victoria Morgan, artistic director emerita, who contacted Amador soon after his defection. “We were doing charades the whole time.”

Within a decade, though, Amador was living a life he had never imagined for himself back in Cuba. He owned a condo in Covington and a house in Mount Washington. He was driving a bright red BMW and was a principal dancer with Cincinnati Ballet. 

Eight weeks after defecting, he told the New York Times that “Some people said, ‘Wait, don’t go.’ But what am I waiting for? . . . I don’t want to wake up one day, realize that I was 40, and then wonder why I didn’t jump when I had the chance.”

He needn’t have worried.

Amador, known affectionately as Cervi, turned 42 on Aug. 16. Last December, he was named artistic director of Cincinnati Ballet. He’s married now and has three children. The current BMW is black. He recently bought a century-old, 3,200-square-foot house in North Avondale. And he has managed to bring the rest of his family from Cuba to Cincinnati.

You couldn’t invent a more uplifting example of the American Dream.

The start of a ‘lovefest’

In 2004, Morgan sent plane tickets to Amador and two other defectors who would eventually join Cincinnati Ballet, Adiarys Almeida and Gema Diaz. The trio hadn’t signed contracts yet. But Morgan wanted them to see the company while she assessed their abilities.

“First, they took a company class,” said Morgan. “I thought they were pretty good. Then we went to Studio C – the basement studio – and they showed me a couple of classical pas de deux. They did ‘Flames of Paris’ and the ‘Don Quixote’ pas de deux. It was when they did that, that I was ready to bow down and do whatever it would take to get them to come here. They were so phenomenal. The rest of the company could have been jealous. Instead, it was kind of a lovefest.”

Weeks later, when Amador made it to the stage, it was clear that audiences felt the love, too. He had a likable presence. He was brash, but not too brash. He was a daring performer, filled with confidence and sex appeal. It was clear that he loved the audience as much as they loved him.

Still, it is possible that his greatest influence was in the rehearsal studio.

After his arrival, the Cincinnati Ballet studio became a more cheerful and optimistic place, as I observed at the time – and as several former dancers have said. There was a deeper sense of camaraderie, particularly among the men.

During breaks, the men would engage in good-natured competitions to see who could do the most pirouettes. They’d play poker and kick soccer balls and play a ballet version of basketball’s “H-O-R-S-E,” where you have to match your colleagues shot for shot, combination for combination, the more outlandish the better.

It was fun and spirited, the dancers said. And it made them better dancers.

“I enjoyed it, but I always wanted to win,” Amador admitted. “That’s how I grew up my whole life. I’m very competitive.”

A quest for stability

September 2023 was a chaotic time for Cincinnati Ballet. Just 14 months after dancer/choreographer Jodie Gates became artistic director, she bailed. Her reasons for leaving have never been disclosed, either by Gates or the company. There aren’t even many rumors floating around to explain it.

Then, less than a week after Gates announced her departure, Scott Altman, then president and CEO, said he was leaving as well to accept a similar position with the Los Angeles Master Chorale.

The company hadn’t experienced this kind of uncertainty since the 1990s, when it went through four artistic directors in eight tumultuous years. 

That all changed in 1997. That’s when Morgan entered the picture. She was the 45-year-old former resident choreographer of the San Francisco Opera who had made her name as a principal dancer with San Francisco Ballet.

By her own admission, Morgan wasn’t prepared for the job. She’d never been an artistic director. She’d never created a season for a company. She’d never had to deal with a board of trustees.

But she was tenacious and enthusiastic – the adjectives that board members would later use to describe Amador, who was every bit as inexperienced as an artistic director as Morgan had been nearly 30 years earlier. Amador was a known entity. But the search committee didn’t select him just because he was already here. They liked his devotion to dance. And to the company itself.

“Look,” Amador said, “I work for Cincinnati Ballet. I am an employee of Cincinnati Ballet. And I want what is best for the company, not necessarily what is best for Cervi. I don’t feel this is my company. I feel leadership. I feel like I am responsible to guide the company artistically. But I am also responsible for the careers of the dancers. I want what is good for the audience, but it also has to be a challenge for the dancers. That should be part of their reward for being here.

“When it comes to the new dancers, I am just like the audience. I have so many questions about them. What are they going to bring to the stage? What are they going to bring to the company? What are we going to learn from them and how will they influence us? I cannot wait to see what they’re going to do.”

CEO Brant a powerful ally

Now, nearly two years after Gates and Altman left, a sense of calm has settled in at the Margaret and Michael Valentine Center for Dance, Cincinnati Ballet’s new Walnut Hills home.

Much of that stems from the leadership of Deborah S. Brant, president and CEO of the company since January 2024. She has brought a much less combative style of management to the company than it had during the Altman era. She also brought a deep understanding and appreciation for dance. Before coming to Cincinnati in 1998, she had been a fundraising consultant for a who’s who of American dance, including New York City Ballet, Paul Taylor Dance Company and Jacob’s Pillow, as well as the Kennedy Center.

While Brant has little involvement in day-to-day artistic operations, her passion for dance has made her a powerful ally for Amador.

“I want him to be successful,” Brant said. “I feel that he has really proven himself. He is so open to input from other people.” Then, she added that “I do not want to be the CEO of any other company. This is the best job. I have spent the last two years bringing back the donors and board members that had drifted to other places.” 

Her most recent success: a sponsor for Amador’s position. He will now be known as The Katherine and Richard Rosenthal Artistic Director of Cincinnati Ballet.

Side hustles become a dance move

Years ago, Amador shared with me some of the many side hustles he engaged in to make more money while he was in the Ballet Nacional de Cuba. Many of them took place when the company was on tour. 

“When we had a big trip to Spain, we had a container come back,” Amador said as he flashed his dimpled smile. “I took home a refrigerator, a television, enough oil for my mom to cook for a year, tomato paste, detergent – things that were very expensive and hard to get in Cuba.”

But where did he get enough cash to pay for all of that? Another side hustle, a favorite one: Cuban cigars.

“Every one of us could bring two boxes of cigars out of the country,” he said, noting that a friend who worked in a cigar factory secured them for $25 per box. “I would talk to the girls in the company and I would ask each one of them to get two boxes for me. So I had something like 10 or 20 boxes every time I would leave Cuba. I would sell those boxes for $250 or $300. And then I would go shopping. You have to hustle to survive.”

It’s not that different being an artistic director.

In November, for instance, the company will perform choreographer Septime Webre’s ballet version of “The Great Gatsby.” It’s a mammoth production created for Webre’s Hong Kong Ballet. The cost of renting the sets and costumes and shipping them to the U.S. was prohibitive. So wheeler-dealer Amador went to work: The costs will now be shared by four companies.

Morgan just smiled when she heared the story. “I think he will succeed,” she said. “He wants it so badly. He’s smart and obviously a determined young man. I feel like there is so much going for him. The thing that was so interesting for me is that when I talked to our patrons and some of our largest donors, they all said the same thing; ‘It’s got to be Cervi.’ ”

The Kaplan New Works Series runs Sept. 12-20. Full 2025-26 season at cballet.org

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This story and images were sponsored by Cincinnati Ballet.