NEW YORK – When Alessandra Ferri, one of the most celebrated dramatic ballerinas of this or any time, takes the stage Friday at the Metropolitan Opera House to channel Virginia Woolf, logic dictates it will be her last dance appearance.
It’s not merely that she’s now 61 — albeit dancing exquisitely — and sharing a stage with dancers one-third her age. It's also that she’s about to embark on an exciting new chapter as artistic director of the Vienna State Ballet, and plans to devote herself “200%” to the task.
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But back to that logic thing: It hasn’t played much of a role in Ferri’s rather astounding career.
After all, she’s retired before — in 2007, from American Ballet Theater — with fanfare and glittery confetti and countless bouquets. Logic would have dictated she stay retired, but there she was in 2015, creating the Woolf role in Wayne McGregor’s “Woolf Works,” which she’s reprising this week with ABT. And there she was in 2016 dancing Juliet, her signature role, at ABT for a night, somehow making a lovesick teenager believable at age 53.
So it’s understandable if Ferri will not, even now, say “never again.”
“I’m not going to think about it!” the dancer said laughingly (but firmly) in an interview last week, taking a break between rehearsals. ”I mean, I do THINK this is it, because I know what’s coming next.” But life, she adds, can be very surprising.
Like that time she ran into choreographer Martha Clarke on the street, six years after retiring, feeling “like I was missing what I loved.” That led to a dance-theater piece called “Cheri” at New York’s Signature Theater, opposite soulful ABT principal Herman Cornejo (who rejoins her onstage this week.)
In the audience one day was choreographer Wayne McGregor, of the Royal Ballet in London, where Ferri began her career. He’d arrived with a major proposal about a new ballet he was mounting. “Will you please be my Virginia?” he asked.
“There’s always a little voice inside me who recognizes when I have to do something,” Ferri says. But still, she had to ask McGregor: “Wayne, are you really aware of how old I am?”
“And he said yes, that he needed a dancer who can embody (Woolf's) soul, her essence,” Ferri says. “So I thought, okay. We can lead each other in this."
In an interview, McGregor expressed wonder at how Ferri, a petite dancer, can project ripples of emotion across a vast opera house in such an effortless way.
“What’s amazing about the world’s greatest performers, of which Alessandra is one, is that they bring the audience to them, they don't need to project OUT,” McGregor said. “Alessandra is tiny, right? But there’s this ability, this magnetism, to be able to bring the audience to her.”
Both dancer and choreographer also note how rare it is for classical ballet, a world of fluttering swans and dainty princesses, to feature a fully fleshed-out female character of a certain age.
“Alessandra is about the age of Virginia Woolf was when she died,” McGregor notes (the writer took her own life, walking into a river at age 59.) “We're so accustomed to seeing or thinking about dance as a young person’s game. We’re not used to seeing the power and expressivity of older bodies, inhabiting roles that reflect much more clearly our living in a contemporary world.” Ferri can do that, he says, and people respond.
“Alessandra is still dancing so beautifully,” adds ABT artistic director Susan Jaffe, herself a former ABT principal of the same generation. “As well as her incredible dramatic ability — she knows how to make the moment so alive, so electric and so authentic. In a way, the movements become sort of an extended gesture of what she's doing emotionally.”
That phenomenon was clear at a recent studio rehearsal. Many young dancers there had never met Ferri in person. As she practiced the death scene, surrounded, lifted and carried by dancers representing waves, all eyes were on Ferri’s Virginia and the tortured yet determined look in her eyes. At the end of her duet with Cornejo, she lay down in watery death. The room erupted in applause.
Applause also, of course, rang through the opera house on Tuesday at Ferri’s first of two performances, with ballet regulars keenly aware that this might be the last time they see her in pointe shoes.
Ferri says one of the reasons she loves her role is that she's able to bring her lengthy past with her.
“I can be myself, at 60, with a path.” she says. “A path full of wonderful moments, joyful moments, sad moments, angry moments, frightening moments. I can bring all of that to this role.”
The audience sees it clearly. One thing it does not see: the incredible effort that goes into making it all look, well, effortless.
McGregor compares Ferri’s physical determination to that of elite athletes.
“You know how you see incredible athletes all of a sudden able to swim the channel in their 60s?” the choreographer asks. “It takes so much training. That is Alessandra, the amount of work she has to do to make it so effortless is way, way more than being able to rely on your body when you’re young."
This is also, now, why Ferri says she is ready to move on. Life running a ballet company, which she begins in 2025, will not allow for hours at the barre.
“I have a lot of energy,” she says. “But I will need it for the dancers. I really want to be there for them.”
Ferri wasn’t always ready. She was approached to run a company years ago, when she first retired. “It wasn’t the right time. This time I was approached, and I went (snaps fingers). I knew back then I wasn’t ready to dedicate myself to others 200%. Now I am.”
But still, rather like the Rolling Stones, Ferri will not say definitively that it’s the last time we see her dance. (Except for Juliet — that role is in the past.)
“I don’t know, because life, as I say, is full of surprises,” she says. “And sometimes — often — it’s turned out in a way that I didn’t expect, you know? So, who knows?”