Alessandra Ferri on Vienna and how growing older is a form of freedom
After a first season in which every performance sold out, the former Royal Ballet prodigy says she is content alone, has thrown away her pointe shoes and still calls La Scala the theatre of her heart.
Alessandra Ferri, who a year ago took over as artistic director of the Vienna State Ballet, has spoken about growing older, fear, solitude and the dancers in her care in a wide-ranging interview with Corriere della Sera’s weekly magazine Sette, published on 13 November 2026.
Interviewed by Fiamma Tinelli in her office at the Vienna State Opera – a bright, sparsely furnished room opening onto a large nineteenth-century terrace – Ferri described a life that has finally slowed enough for her to enjoy it.
Ferri’s first season in charge, the one that just ended, sold out for every performance. Backstage, she greets her dancers with the attentiveness of someone who notices who has been unwell. The company is currently performing John Neumeier‘s Nijinsky, which she calls a ballet that could hardly be more timely, since it portrays the hell of war.
Passing on a legacy
She had expected it to take months to bring the company to the standard she demands, the only one she knows. The dancers, she says, followed her at once: they are hungry for nourishment.
I am happy to be able to pass on my experience and the legacy of the great masters with whom I have worked. To explain what MacMillan wanted in that passage and what look Petit was looking for. I don’t impose my vision; I help them seek their truth.
In her view, talent is visible straight away, and she recalls Balanchine’s line that he looked for dancers who need to dance rather than want to. But talent is not enough without dedication. She worries that younger dancers are distracted by social media, propping up phones to film themselves for posting. A dancer, she argues, must not watch herself from outside but stay inside the movement – something she learned long ago from Mikhail Baryshnikov.
Lessons from Baryshnikov
Ferri was already a principal at The Royal Ballet at 19. In 1985 Baryshnikov brought her to American Ballet Theatre in New York, where she was 21 and, by her own account, talented but still very young. Working under him was hard: he was rigorous and impatient, and curt when something went wrong.
Her fears in those years went largely unspoken. Her mother, Carla, was a steadfast supporter, but contact was limited to a collect call each Wednesday evening, and Ferri kept most worries to herself, half believing that unspoken fears would simply vanish.
Solitude, fear and the empty theatre
Fame, she says, meant being alone far more often than not. Back in her New York flat, there was nobody waiting, and over time she learned to love solitude. She was known for slipping out of a back door after a performance, needing to recover herself after giving everything.
What she misses most about her dancing life is the empty theatre. She recalls walking onto the stage of the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires hours before a performance, in what would be one of her last appearances. A technician spotted her and switched on all the lights, and she burst into tears. In an empty house, she explains, you are alone with your talent, your doubts and your vulnerability, and everything is bigger than you. Fear, she admits, has never gone away. Her answer to it is brief: “Desire beats every fear.”
Dancing the present
After retiring from the stage, Ferri returned at 50 for a further decade of acclaimed performances in works created for her.
I knew I didn’t have to compete with the me I had been. I listened to my body: can I no longer jump? Well, I’ll do other things. Life must be danced in the moment, not in the life of before, but in the life of now. Even the passage of time is life.
For her, ageing is a form of freedom. She feels far more at peace than she did years ago, and free to be who she really is inside. She has thrown away or given away her pointe shoes, since for her things that are over are over – though she says she might return at 70… “who knows!”
She did not dance for applause, she says, but because dancing made her happy, even alone in a studio. She no longer takes class, because she would spend it correcting herself. She does Pilates, and this summer took two months’ holiday – the first long break since primary school.
There is a statue of her at the Royal Ballet School in London. She calls it an honour but says she doesn’t dwell on her past; she lives in the present, doing the washing and, she jokes, cooking, though her daughters would laugh at such a claim.
Family, love and living alone
Ferri now lives alone for the first time since she was 25. Her apartment is five minutes from the theatre, and she cycles to work. After 30 years in New York, she finds quiet Vienna a different world. Her daughters are grown – Matilde lives in Milan, Emma in London – and she says the relationship has become a dialogue between women in which she can confide in them too.
Matilde gave her a granddaughter, Teodora, a year ago. Ferri adores her, but says she is not a storybook grandmother and has no such instinct.
Love, she says, has been fundamental, both to her life and to what she brought to the stage. She speaks of great loves, in particular Fabrizio Ferri, the father of her daughters, and says she learned a great deal about herself through the pain of endings. Dance, she says, saved her after that separation and at other times: the morning routine, the rehearsals, and the audience force you to carry on. For the first time, she says, she is content on her own and no longer needs a partner – though if love arrives, so be it. What matters most to her is giving love, including to her dancers.
Among the few possessions she brought to Vienna were her late mother’s walking stick and her late father’s watch, which he kept searching for in his final years, even when it was on his wrist.
What comes next
La Scala approached her years ago to lead its ballet company, but she had other commitments. Would she consider it now, after her Vienna chapter ends? She would if the conditions were right. La Scala, she says, remains the theatre of her heart.
I’ve never made plans in my life; things just happened, and I went along with them. Maybe I’ll move again, maybe I’ll become a grandmother. Maybe I’ll end up surrounding myself with animals, too, like Brigitte Bardot.
