Ballerina Alessandra Ferri: 'I've learnt not to compete with my younger self'

“I do it because I love it,” says Alessandra Ferri. “I mean, I’ve got pains and things going on, obviously, but I don’t try any more to compete with my younger self. I’ve given up on that. I can’t be 20, I can’t dance like I was 20. But I totally enjoy dancing what I dance now.”

For those who don’t know, Ferri, born in Milan in 1963, is one of the most exquisite, enduring, globally garlanded ballerinas her profession has ever known. And here she is, in her late 50s, still dancing lead roles, at Covent Garden, at Sadler’s Wells. “This whole thing about going, ‘You’re a certain age, so you’ve got to behave like this’? Or, ‘You have to behave like that because you’re a mother’? I am who I am.”

Who she is, as swiftly became clear on her graduation to the Royal Ballet in 1980, is a dancer of heartbreaking artistry. Ferri arrived as the winner of the gold-standard Prix de Lausanne, and swiftly developed into a particularly world-class interpreter of the works of Kenneth MacMillan. 

To the flawed heroines of Romeo and Juliet, Manon, Mayerling and Different Drummer (the last of which MacMillan created on her) – as well as their 19th-century forebears such as Giselle – she lent an infinitely beguiling combination of physical and facial radiance, keen intelligence and lyrical, lighter-than-air technique, not to mention the most perfectly arched feet in the business.

How, I wonder, has she always managed to breathe such profound inner life into each character, to speak with such clarity and poetry through the steps? “This sounds funny,” she replies, “but I’ve always been very scared about going on stage – always. I always felt I was never up to it, was never good enough. And I think that immersing myself in the character and ‘living’ it would take my mind off the fact that I was performing. So, I think it was a mechanism.” She gives one of many big laughs. “A defence mechanism!”

If defence mechanism it is, it has proved an extravagantly fruitful one. Small wonder that Ferri was a Royal Ballet principal by the age of 20. Or, indeed, that she was poached in 1985, less than two years after that promotion, by another leading troupe, American Ballet Theatre.

“I loved the Royal Ballet,” she says, “and I was loved. But I was 21, and Mikhail Baryshnikov” – to these eyes, the finest male ballet dancer of all time – “said, ‘Would you like to come and dance with me at ABT in New York?’ And it was kind of hard to say no! I thought, ‘Well, if I do say no, he’s not going to ask me again.’”

Although Ferri retired from dance in 2007, by which point she had been a globetrotting principal guest artist for 15 years, she returned to the stage in 2013, since when she has enjoyed an astonishing Indian summer. In recent years, she has charmed Covent Garden audiences (and critics) with lead roles in Wayne McGregor’s Woolf Works, Martha Clarke’s Chéri, Frederick Ashton’s Marguerite and Armand and the portmanteau evening Trio Concert Dance. 

Next month, at Sadler’s Wells, she will join Birmingham Royal Ballet director and fellow former Royal Ballet star Carlos Acosta (a mere stripling at 48) for a specially created duet by choreographer Goyo Montero, as part of BRB’s Curated by Carlos bill.

And this week, at the age of 58 – marking 40 years since she joined the Royal Ballet – she is starring in the revival of choreographer Maurice Béjart’s L’Heure exquise, at the Linbury Theatre.

But what, I wonder, was it that made Ferri step away from the stage almost 15 years ago? “We all get to an age where we start to feel that we are ageing, and there’s an aspect of fear there,” she admits. “For a dancer, that comes quite early. You start thinking in your early 40s, ‘I’m different’ – you start to feel things are changing in your body, in your ‘instrument’. I’d like the readers to understand that a dancer’s perception of their own body is not so much on an everyday human level, but is as an instrument.

“It’s like your car is not as safe, the brakes are a bit off – you may have a Ferrari, but it’s an old car and technologically it’s not up to date. And so, that feeling is a little scary. And then I also started thinking, ‘I don’t want to be dancing the roles that I’ve danced with so much pleasure and ease and abandon and feel that I’m not giving the same performance.’”

For all that, however – and her enjoyment at joining the Spoleto arts festival in Umbria in 2008 as director of dance programming – Ferri says she eventually, “kind of felt something was switching off in me”. And, having created a small piece for herself at Spoleto, The Piano Upstairs, a typically chance meeting with Martha Clarke in Manhattan led to the creation of the latter’s cross-generational romance Chéri, and a full return to the stage.

For this mother of two (Matilde, 24, and Emma, 19), though now separated from their father, Fabrizio, Bejart’s 1998 piece struck an instant chord. L’Heure exquise is an adaptation of Samuel Beckett’s searingly bittersweet 1962 study of the human condition, Happy Days, in which a middle-aged woman grapples with her past and her personal effects while rooted increasingly unforgivingly to the spot. 

The protagonist is now, as Ferri puts it, “an old ballerina, in search of happiness and happy thoughts. And this is really personal. It’s me and my memories, me and my giving up dance, me and the audience. What is dance for me? Is dance keeping me crazy, or keeping me sane?”

Inevitably (this is dance, after all), Ferri’s character – unlike “Winnie”, in Beckett’s original – breaks free from her initial confinement, to be partnered by Hamburg Ballet’s Carsten Jung. But, for the first 10 minutes – and later, too – she is rooted not in Beckett’s scorched-grass-covered mound, but in a vast heap of pointe shoes.

“I had to collect about 3,000 shoes in order to build the set,” she says. “Of course, this was during lockdown, and nobody was using shoes, so I was like, ‘My God, how am I going to do this?’ So, I had the Royal Ballet send me shoes, English National Ballet, Hamburg, La Scala – so four companies were sending me all the shoes that they could find, left somewhere or whatever. And when I was enclosed in it for the first time, I realised that all these shoes have a story.

“It’s really beautiful,” she explains. “In each of those shoes, there have been the hopes of some girl, some dancer – they’ve had a nice day, or a bad day, or a disappointment, or a dream. So, they all tell a story, each one of them, and it’s really touching for me. I feel I’m not alone, that I have all of them with me, all the ballerinas’ lives.”

L’Heure exquise is at the Royal Opera House’s Linbury Theatre from tomorrow-Oct 23. Tickets: 020 7304 4000; roh.org.uk

Curated by Carlos is at Sadler’s Wells Nov 3-5. Tickets: 020 7863 8000; sadlerswells.com