At 19, Alessandra Ferri was the Royal Ballet’s youngest-ever principal ballerina. Now, more than 30 years later, she has become its oldest-ever leading lady. As the despairing heroine of Woolf Works last year, Wayne McGregor’s three-act piece on the suicidal writer, the incandescent Italian won both Olivier and Critics’ Circle awards. It’s a memorable second act for a dancer who retired at 44, with no intention to return.
We’re meeting at the Royal Opera House after a day of rehearsal for Woolf Works, which is returning to the repertory. Ignoring the light switches, Ferri emerges through the gloom with an impassioned and confiding voice, her dramatic dark eyes catching the grey light. Her renewed fame has led to a modelling contract with Boots and middle-aged icon status, but today she is scrubbed, in black, without jewellery or make-up.
She smiles when I ask if she’s bored by discussing her unusual comeback. “It’s fine! I retired, and I was done. I’d done everything I wanted to do. It was absolutely the right decision. I think stepping away from my career freed me.”
After leaving American Ballet Theater in 2007, for seven years she even went cold turkey on the dedicated daily training that shapes a dancer’s being. Her two daughters grew into teenagers, and her 15-year marriage to the photographer Fabrizio Ferri came to an end. As a dancer, she says: “You’re confronting yourself every day. You’re always trying to go beyond. You do miss that, suddenly life becomes very... superficial. I realised I wasn’t completely myself without it.”
The formerly driven ballerina was a different person, ready for a challenge. As she says: “Things happened.” First came Chéri, Martha Clarke’s steamy dance-drama based on Colette’s novella, which visited Covent Garden’s Linbury Studio Theatre in 2015. “I came back not because I wanted to continue my career,” Ferri declares, “but because of my passion — my original passion when I was a little girl for whom dance was the light of her life. It’s the same now. I wake up with enthusiasm at 53 years old, and that is fantastic.”
Advertisement
“Sometimes I feel younger than I did 10 years ago
Her passion for dance sparked early — at the age of just three, as she grew up in Rome. She trained in Milan and London, where, in 1980, the Royal Ballet’s star choreographer, Kenneth MacMillan, saw her in class and pegged her as muse material. A master of murky emotions, he brought her into the company and created new ballets around her.
“Kenneth was an x-ray,” Ferri says. “He knew what you were like in your psyche. He would put you in situations where you felt uncomfortable, to see if you could stand up or not. You had to have no fear with him. It was about instinct and survival.”
After making her name with fearless technique and dramatic daring, Ferri left for New York (still her home) to dance opposite Mikhail Baryshnikov. “Here I was, at 21, dancing with Misha, who was the greatest star in the world. I did my first Giselle next to him, with Michael Jackson and Elizabeth Taylor in the audience.” She shrugs at her starstruck young self. “Who cares, but it does matter when you’re 21. There are moments when you either survive or don’t, and there was something in me that survived.” That impulse to test her limits returned when McGregor approached her about portraying Virginia Woolf, on a stage she last graced in 2003.
At 52, could she manage it? “I thought, I frankly don’t know. But I’ll say yes, because if I do, I have to step up.” Did she worry about trashing her reputation? “I’m not scared, You always have to surpass yourself to go forward. Otherwise life is not worth living. So let’s do something uncomfortable.”
She radiates enthusiasm for Woolf Works. “All the details surface, it’s very rich.” The ballet pulls audiences into the author’s desolate psyche and teeming imaginative world. “Wayne achieved something I have never seen done so clearly,” his star agrees. “Without being factual, without mime, you see the essence of this woman. There is a loneliness, a sadness that penetrates very deeply. There is so much going on around me, then there is this lost soul. So vulnerable, so delicate. It’s a very contemporary work, but very moving.”
Advertisement
Talking of moving: moving the McGregor way looks extreme, with its daringly extended limbs, audaciously arched spines. “It’s very different,” Ferri admits. “He initiated a physical movement that a classically trained ballerina is not used to. It starts with the shoulder and goes to the foot, which for us is — waah! — completely reversed. I decided not to judge or get in the way. Somehow I joined him there, and he joined me.” As she notes, Woolf Works is “not a typical work” for McGregor, and audiences have responded to its emotional depth.
As McGregor is quite the brainbox, I imagine rehearsals might become seminars on Woolf’s life and works, but no. “Never. It was the same with Kenneth. You don’t talk about it. You work at a deeper level, which you can’t really explain.” She reread Woolf’s novels before embarking on rehearsal, especially Mrs Dalloway, which informs the first section. “I like to read as much as I can, process it, then forget it. I want it to become part of me. What happens is that my body takes over. It starts singing, it becomes music. That’s when the character starts to surface.”
The ballet has made her a role model for the older woman in a youngster’s art form. She seems bemused by the attention. “What people are inspired by is that I’m showing, when you follow your real passion, you have no age. I don’t like the word “middle-aged”. Sometimes I feel younger than I did 10 years ago. I have a new enthusiasm, it makes you feel alive. It’s not about wrinkles. You can have no wrinkles and be a really apathetic person and be old in the spirit.”
She refuses to speculate on how far this renewed career will extend. “I don’t know if I have a year, two, three, it’s hard to say. I just live in the moment, and I’ve never lived like this. It’s, like, wow!”
Ferri is crisp, decisive, as incisive in speech as in movement. So I’m surprised when she admits to rattling stage fright. “One of the reasons I stopped dancing was because of stage fright. I would not sleep for days before, it was a nightmare. I was sick to my stomach, shaking. Every performance.” From the start? “Throughout my career. I think that’s how I became a good actress, because I had to develop this skill of pretending I wasn’t scared! When I stopped, I thought, I’m so relieved. I don’t ever have to go through that again.”
Advertisement
I’m afraid to ask how the stage fright is now. “Gone. I don’t have it any more. It came from thinking I wasn’t good enough. Now I think, it’s who I am. I work hard, this is the best I can do.” She positively guffaws. “Now there’s no stopping me!”
Age cannot wither them
Alessandra Ferri isn’t alone in extending her career into her sixth decade. But classical ballet makes cruel demands, so most midlife dancers create new work, rather than rehashing their swans and fairies. The French star Sylvie Guillem retired last year at 51, after a slew of challenging new pieces. Wendy Whelan, 49, former whiplash leading lady of New York City Ballet, is similarly venturesome.
Yet as technique becomes elusive, a dancer’s artistry may deepen. The compelling Zenaida Yanowsky, 41, has just announced her departure from the Royal Ballet, though not her retirement. Audiences adore a star at whatever age: they flocked to see Margot Fonteyn into her sixties, and Alicia Alonso into her seventies. How long should ballerinas continue? The answer lies somewhere between charisma and self-knowledge.
Woolf Works, ROH, London WC2, from Sat until Feb 14
