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Alessandra Ferri

Alessandra Ferri, born in Milan in 1963, prima ballerina etoile, is considered one of the greatest interpreters of ballet in the world.

After studying in Milan, at the School of Ballet of the Teatro alla Scala, at the age of fifteen she won a scholarship awarded by the British Council (the first time for a dancer), and moved to London to continue her studies. In 1980 she joined the English Royal Ballet and in 1983, at the age of nineteen, she was promoted to prima ballerina, received the Sir Lawrence Award and was named dancer of the year by Dance and Dancers magazine and the New York Times.

In 1985, at the invitation of Mikhail Baryshnikov, she moved to the American Ballet Theatre as prima ballerina: with this company she toured all over the world.

In 2007 she said goodbye to La Scalaand to the American Ballet. After a break of 7 years, Ferri returned to the stage in Spoleto in 2013, starting a second chapter of her career, going against the crystallization of the repertoire. In her latest interpretations she updates her characters both in the interpretative and in the executive aspect, and refusing to assume the connotations of the dematerialized and asexual dancer.

In May 2021, Alessandra Ferri is a guest of Oriente Occidente Studio to rehearse L'Heure Exquise, a show that will debut at Ravenna Festival in June, with which the étoile celebrates 40 years of career.

With L'Heure Exquise, based on Samuel Beckett's Oh, les beaux jours (Happy days), Alessandra Ferri plays an important role: Winnie, the "âgée" dancer imagined by Maurice Bejart in 1998 for Carla Fracci, who in her melancholic solitude lives in the joyful memories of her happy days. In the piece Willy, the He - at the time impersonated by Micha van Hoecke and now by Carsten Jung of John Neumeier's Hamburg Ballet - is an ex-partner of She, submerged not by the famous hill of sand, but by a mountain of old pointe shoes.

The work is reassembled with the support of Maina Gielgud during the artistic residency in the creation spaces of Oriente Occidente Studio.

Thanks to the collaboration of the Municipality of Rovereto, Ferri's residency also includes a few days of rehearsal on stage at Teatro Zandonai. Alessandra Ferri has also been invited by Vittorio Sgarbi, president of Mart, and Trentino Marketing to give a special welcome to the guests present at the opening of the exhibition Botticelli. His time. And our time.

In 2021, it will be forty years since I joined the Royal Ballet in London, beginning my artistic journey. In order to celebrate this milestone with the public, I was looking for a meaningful role, one that had never been performed, that was right and exciting for the artist I am now. Rearranging my archives, I found a page that spoke of a work by Maurice Béjart based on an extraordinary text by Samuel Beckett: Giorni felici. A chance? I like to think rather of a "sign", a concatenation of dates, anniversaries, emotions: I discovered that in 2021 it will be sixty years since Beckett wrote the famous play.

- Alessandra Ferri

The project is in collaboration with Comune di Rovereto, Mart Museo di Arte Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto and Trentino Marketing.