Alessandra Ferri
Described by the New York Times as "one of the greatest dramatic dancers of all time", Alessandra Ferri was born in Milan. She trained first at the Scuola del Teatro alla Scala and then, at the age of 15, moved to the Royal Ballet School in London, where she completed her final two years of training.
She joined the Royal Ballet at the age of 17 and was appointed Principal Dancer of the company when she was only 19. Choreographer Sir Kenneth MacMillan immediately entrusted her with all his most famous ballets and created several especially for her. One of these, Valley of Shadows, led to her winning her first Sir Laurence Olivier Award at the tender age of 21. At the Royal Ballet, she also worked with Sir Frederick Ashton and Dame Ninette de Valois.
Invited by Mikhail Baryshnikov to join the American Ballet Theatre as a Principal Dancer in 1985, she performed all the roles of the classical repertoire, often at his side, and worked with some of the greatest choreographers of the 20th century, including Jerome Robbins, Twyla Tharp, Agnes de Mille, Antony Tudor and Jiří Kylián. It was in New York that MacMillan created Requiem for Baryshnikov and Ferri, with music by Andrew Lloyd Weber. She also starred alongside Baryshnikov in the film Dancers in 1987. Alessandra Ferri remained with the American Ballet Theatre until 2007 but continued to work with the company until 2018 when Wayne McGregor created AfteRite especially for her. In 1989, she began a very long collaboration with Roland Petit, performing his ballets all over the world, as a guest of many international companies as well as the Ballet de Marseille. Petit created the role of Le Diable Amoureux especially for her and directed her in Jean Cocteauʼs La Voix humaine at the Piccolo Teatro in Milan. In 1992, she became a permanent guest at Teatro alla Scala, and it was the famous Milanese theatre that appointed her Prima Ballerina Assoluta, a title created by Marius Petipa in 1894 and given to only two Italian dancers, one of them was Alessandra Ferri. Her collaboration with La Scala proved to be invigorating and continues to this day. There, in 1998, William Forsythe created the ballet Quartette for her. These were years of intense collaboration with Maestro Riccardo Muti, during which she performed several times in operas and ballets conducted by him.
In 2015, she also resumed her collaboration with the Royal Ballet in London, where Wayne McGregor created the role of Virginia Woolf for her in his ballet Woolf Works, for which she won her second Sir Laurence Olivier Award. Alessandra Ferri also works frequently with John Neumeier, interpreting his choreographies at the Stuttgart Ballet, La Scala and often dancing as a guest at the Hamburg Ballet. In 2016, Neumeier created the role of Eleonora Duse for her in his ballet Duse.
Throughout her career, Alessandra Ferri has also been a guest of many prestigious companies worldwide, including, to name but a few, the Opéra national de Paris, the Mariinsky Theatre, the Cuban National Ballet, the National Ballet of Canada, the Stuttgart Ballet, the Teatro Colón, the Tokyo Ballet, the English National Ballet, the New National Theatre Tokyo and the Béjart Ballet Lausanne. At the Vienna State Opera, she made a guest appearance at the 2001 Ballet Gala in a pas de deux from Jerome Robbins' Other Dances alongside Robert La Fosse.
In addition to her two Laurence Olivier Awards, which she won thirty years apart, Alessandra Ferri has received many other awards, including the Prix de Lausanne, the Prix Benois de la Danse, the Dance Magazine Award and the Dance Critics Award. In 2006 she was appointed Cavaliere della Repubblica Italiana by President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi and in 2023 Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture. In 2024, she was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Prix de Lausanne.
From 2008 to 2014, she was director of the dance section at the Spoleto Festival, where she presented works by Ratmansky, McGregor, Wheeldon, Bausch, Robbins, Kylián and Neumeier. In recent years, she has produced and performed shows that she has taken on long international tours. Two of these stand out: L’Heure Exquise by Maurice Béjart, a work created by the great French choreographer in 1998, which has been lost, reconstructed and brought back to life with great success by Alessandra Ferri, and Trio ConcertDance by different choreographers, with which in 2019 she inaugurated the Linbury Theater, the new theatre of the Royal Opera House. In 2013, at the Signature Theatre in New York, Martha Clarke created the role of Léa for her in Chéri, a show that ran for hundred performances. In recent years, she has also dedicated herself passionately to teaching and rehearsing the principal dancers of the Royal Ballet, La Scala and the American Ballet Theatre.
From the 2025/26 season, Alessandra Ferri will take over as Director of the Vienna State Ballet.