![]() Watching Ferri define the essence of Duse in Neumeier’s ballet is to understand what theatrical illusion can be. She shared her most intimate moments, her human self.” I cannot become someone else, but I lend myself to the character and the role. It’s important to remember she was an enormous star in North America, too, even though she didn’t perform in English. “Duse was a very different person from me, but we shared experiences. “The parallels are interesting,” Ferri says. The work about the great Italian actress is in many ways a confrontation between two stars. Her latest dramatic creation, the role of Eleanora Duse in John Neumeier’s new ballet, Duse, premiered at the Hamburg Opera House in December 2015. I’m very demanding, I know that, but my body somehow does what I want it to.” “Pressure is something you put on yourself. Was there pressure to be good? “Of course there was,” she smiles. I was there, myself, the whole of myself. You need to understand how a dream can shatter. “When you’re young, you only understand the early part of Juliet’s story. ![]() It had to be all new.”įerri doesn’t deny her age and the effect that has on performance. ![]() I didn’t want to dance with someone I had danced Juliet with before. I had a wonderful partner in Herman Cornejo. Everything I had learned stayed with me and I used that. At the premiere, I felt such honesty and truth onstage that night. “It was important not to remember how it felt back then. When she returned to the role this July in New York, Ferri cast off memories of her earlier Juliet. Margot Fonteyn danced Juliet when she was 60. But a whole new chapter opened in my life. “Then I did Chéri for Martha Clarke at Signature Theater in New York and Woolf Works by Wayne McGregor for the Royal Ballet in 2015.” When artistic director Kevin Mackenzie suggested she dance Juliet again with American Ballet Theatre, she said, “Why not?” It was an important taste of something she craved. In 2013, Ferri returned to dance in The Piano Upstairs, which she choreographed for Spoleto Festival. “And I began to go to Pilates and exercise class, and to rebuild my strength. “They’re Italian, my daughters, but they are American, too, with busy lives,” she says. (Ferri and their father, a photographer, are divorced.) My life was getting smaller and that was wrong.”įerri discovered her two daughters, Emma and Matilde, now 15 and 18, had lives of their own and felt happy at home in New York City where they lived with their mother. Being a parent doesn’t have to mean sacrificing yourself. Ultimately I realized something was missing. “I lived for my children and thought they needed me. I just wanted to step away,” she explains. I felt in a single moment an era of my life was finished. “You reach an age where you start comparing yourself with who you once were. If you don’t, someone else will.’”ĭespite the success she achieved in her career, Ferri quit dance at 44. In New York, it was, ‘Here’s your costume. “In London, you were nurtured, given everything you needed. It was my home, but you need to go out and see the world.” Alessandra Ferri in American Ballet Theatre’s Romeo and Juliet | Photo: Rosalie O’Connor “I left because Misha, director of the company then, asked me to dance at ABT. When she suddenly left for New York and American Ballet Theatre two years later, London fans were devastated. At 19, she became one of the youngest principal dancers at Covent Garden.In some perfectly logical way, she became a muse of the great Sir Kenneth MacMillan and the darling of the London ballet set. She was attracted to the musicality of dance, especially ballet. “You’re sure there’s no caffeine?” she asks the waiter before taking a sip.īorn in Milan 53 years ago, Ferri trained at La Scala Ballet School. The tea arrives, and Ferri sniffs its heady aroma. Sometimes you have to come full circle to find out who you are and where you are going.” “But life has a way of bringing you back, of helping you rediscover moments. “No caffeine, it’s lethal, caffeine and jet lag.”įerri smiles one of her sweet smiles, which you recognize from when she played Juliet more than 30 years ago at Covent Garden. Sitting gingerly on an uncomfortable banquette, she orders tea. Stepping into the bar of Hamburg’s Side Hotel, a deconstructionist building with ugly lobby lights, Alessandra Ferri wraps her pale, diaphanous shawl tighter around her shoulders.
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