For Alessandra Ferri, Playing Virginia Woolf in New “Woolf Works ”Ballet Was 'A Great Honor' and a Challenge (Exclusive)

“It's just a very powerful, moving work,” says Ferri of the ballet, now in performances at the Metropolitan Opera House

Virginia Woolf’s beloved novels are coming to life in a ballet, now making its New York premiere with the American Ballet Theatre (ABT).

Woolf Works, in performances at the Metropolitan Opera House through June 29, is more than a tribute to the beloved English writer. Featuring choreography by Wayne McGregor and a score by Max Richter, the award-winning production brings the author’s most prominent works to life beyond the page.

The ballet, which debuted in London in 2015, is divided into three parts. “I now, I then,” based on Woolf’s 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway, features a single dancer playing both protagonist Clarissa Dalloway and the author herself. “Becomings” pulls from Woolf’s 1928 novel Orlando, now regarded as one of the first transgender novels in the English language. “Tuesday,” the final part of the triptych, portrays themes from the author's 1931 book The Waves, and ends with Woolf’s death; the writer died by suicide in 1941.

For Alessandra Ferri, who will play the dual role of Clarissa and Woolf in two shows during Woolf Works' run, the part has been with her for years, in more ways than one.

“I read [Woolf’s] work when I was young,” Ferri tells PEOPLE. “In fact, I read Mrs. Dalloway many, many years before Orlando and totally enjoyed them and loved them. Of course, it's very different when you read things just for your own pleasure and when you revisit them with such a close connection to the work, because then you're trying to be aware of the impressions that the work leaves in you. That's what happened when I read it again.”

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Ferri, 61, is an Olivier Award-winning performer and prima ballerina assoluta (an honor given to the most notable female dancers) who has been affiliated with such prestigious companies as the Royal Ballet, La Scala and the Hamburg Ballet. She’s come out of a temporary retirement to dance Woolf Works with the American Ballet Theater, where she was a principal dancer for over two decades.

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It’s a fitting homecoming, as the dual role of Clarissa and Woolf was created for her by McGregor in 2015, and is one that the Italian dancer finds particularly important at this point in her career.

“I have a very different experience in this second part of my artistic life, and I think it is the honesty and strength of being able to dance who I am and [as] characters that are my age,” Ferri says, of her connection to the role. “Dance can be a language that can represent life in every aspect. It's a lot of work. It's not easy, because obviously the body is the body, so you have to fight it sometimes … but there's a very beautiful, liberating and calm feeling about just [being] onstage.”

While Ferri has worked with esteemed choreographers throughout her career, including Jerome Robbins, the Broadway choreographer behind shows including West Side Story, and Sir Frederick Ashton, the principal choreographer of the Royal Ballet, collaborating with McGregor was a new experience for her. Like Woolf’s signature stream-of-consciousness writing style, Ferri says that McGregor approached the piece in a similar way.

“With Wayne, you just create with no boundaries, no sense of time or place, within the ballet,” Ferri says. “I didn't know if what we were doing was the beginning of the ballet, the end of the ballet. I didn't know. We would just create things, movement, situations and then they all fell in the right place. Somehow the work creates itself.”

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Portraying a real person, Ferri agrees, was both "a great honor" and a challenge. Her interpretation of Woolf taught her that “We can be so strong, so innovative and so fragile and so lonely with our demons.”

“She was such a revolutionary woman, really, in her writing and the strength that she had,” Ferri says of the author. “She was the first modern writer, really. And at the same time, she was so devastatingly lonely, with this condition that she had and which destroyed her and ate her alive.”

"When you are an artist and you write a story, it's you," Ferri says. "Even us as interpreters, when [we've] done something, it's us. We lend ourself to that character ... Factually, [it] might be a very different life, but internally is you."

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Despite its roots in Woolf’s literature, no prior knowledge of the author’s work is required to enjoy the ballet. Ferri, who will begin her tenure as artistic director for the Vienna State Ballet in 2025, hopes that audiences “take away whatever they get.”

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“It's just a very powerful, moving work,” she says. “You don't need to understand anything literally. You just need to allow yourself to feel.”

Woolf Works is now in performances at the Metropolitan Opera House through June 29.

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