All the Right Moves, a Few Wrong Words and a Perfect Blend

The trouble with athletes is, the better they are at what they do, the worse they are at describing how it feels to do it.

This trouble might not be troublesome to the average fan, but it is to me, since part of my job is to get athletes to wax poetic about their feats. A few do it. Reggie Jackson can take you inside a home run, and Magic Johnson will describe the beauty of a fast break until his eyes mist over.

But, more typically, try asking Nolan Ryan to tell you what it feels like to throw a 95 m.p.h. fastball past Dave Parker. Ryan is a friendly, talkative guy, but he’ll look at you like he’s a plumber and you just asked him to paint a poetic word picture of installing a bathroom sink.

I found one last week, an athlete who talks a good game. Her name is Alessandra Ferri. She is a 22-year-old Italian superstar, a principal dancer for the American Ballet Theatre. Her performances opposite Mikhail Baryshnikov have knocked the fans and critics off their collective feet.

(There may be those who question whether ballet dancers should be considered athletes, since at a ballet there is no scoreboard and the performers don’t spend a lot of time publicly adjusting their uniforms and equipment. But consider this: Ballplayers with exceeding grace are often compared to ballet dancers, most frequently to Baryshnikov, yet when was the last time you heard a ballet critic or fan say “Wow, Baryshnikov looks like a regular Steve Garvey out there”?)

Ferri and Baryshnikov are dancing together during the ABT’s current Los Angeles series, and in at least one of their recent performances, Baryshnikov turned in what some experts called his best dancing in 10 years. And Ferri has the critics doing verbal stag leaps. The Times’ Martin Bernheimer writes of her dancing with “uncontrollable passion” and says she’s “one of those rare and wondrous dancing actresses who spare nothing, and who, on occasion, willingly sacrifice technical perfection for emotional impact.”

To Alessandra, dance was always more than just a series of movements to be learned and performed. She remembers at a very young age seeing a French ballet company.

“They’re known for being a very sexy company,” Ferri says. “It shocked me how the movement, it would make you not just sit there and go, ‘Oh, they look so pretty,’ but you go, ‘God, that’s incredible !’ And that’s where I began to realize you can use your body in many different ways.

“That’s why all these girl go crazy over Misha (Baryshnikov), because the way he dance is so physical and so sexy. He’s like a panther, you know how they walk, you almost see their muscles twitching.”

Alessandra has twitchy muscles, too. She comes from an athletic family. She was a competitive swimmer as a young girl, and, “My father used to be an Italian champion of--how you say when you run and jump over the barriers?”

I would’ve told her we say “hurdling,” but I like her way better. She speaks slightly broken English with a British-Italian accent which is fairly charming.

She is an athlete, but like many great athletes, her greatness comes not just from executing the moves, but from a certain style and intensity beyond the grasp of most mortals. Jerry West, for instance, didn’t just shoot jump shots real well. He transcended the technical form. Call it art, or heart. Some are born with it.

“I think that it’s very important to express things with your body,” Ferri says. “A movement has to go through every muscle of your body to be electrifying. Otherwise it just looks pretty, but it’s light, it has no weight. A stretch (here she arches her left arm toward the ceiling) almost goes to the infinite, it doesn’t ever stop. It communicates something. So I always try to feel everything through my entire body.”

This puts her nicely in tune with Baryshnikov, who stole her away from the stodgy Royal Ballet in London last year for the ABT.

“He is very, very demanding,” Ferri says. “He will not let you get away with anything. Which is great, it really makes me push hard. At first I was, not terrified, but tense all the time. Now I understand the way he works.

“I’ve learned from him concentration. He is so into the part he is playing, and concentrated on the performance, the music, he is never distracted once in the performance. When I’m with him I feel that complete, how you say, commitment .

“And he never doubts that he can do a step. He just goes, he knows he will do it. No hesitation. Which is frightening, because I always think, ‘What if it goes wrong?’ He says, ‘Don’t think that, it’s not going to go wrong.’ ”

And when Misha and Alessandra dance together, it doesn’t.

“Sometimes, maybe because you’re not into a performance, or something is going wrong physically, you seem to panic and think about your body so much you cut off from the other person,” Alessandra says. “You’re pretending, and it is not real. With Misha, it is a feeling of you let yourself go towards each other more, you open up to each other. There’s like electricity between you, which is very exciting.”