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.’”įor 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”. “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. 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. You start thinking in your early 40s, ‘I’m different’ – you start to feel things are changing in your body, in your ‘instrument’. 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.Īnd 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.īut 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. 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.

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.’”Īlthough 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. “I loved the Royal Ballet,” she says, “and I was loved. Or, indeed, that she was poached in 1985, less than two years after that promotion, by another leading troupe, American Ballet Theatre. Small wonder that Ferri was a Royal Ballet principal by the age of 20. If defence mechanism it is, it has proved an extravagantly fruitful one. So, I think it was a mechanism.” She gives one of many big laughs. And I think that immersing myself in the character and ‘living’ it would take my mind off the fact that I was performing. I always felt I was never up to it, was never good enough. 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. 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. 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. Who she is, as swiftly became clear on her graduation to the Royal Ballet in 1980, is a dancer of heartbreaking artistry. “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.” And here she is, in her late 50s, still dancing lead roles, at Covent Garden, at Sadler’s Wells. But I totally enjoy dancing what I dance now.”įor 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.

I can’t be 20, I can’t dance like I was 20.

“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 do it because I love it,” says Alessandra Ferri.

Matilde ferri