Best of the Bay
BEST SECRET SUPERSTAR
This Fiery ballet queen is poised for a bold new move.
Lorena Feijóo has just left the stage at the War Memorial Opera House,
and back among the curtains and cables, she pulses with the energy of a mare in the winner's circle. The ballerina has just finished another joyful performance in Lambarena, and as she sweats and greets a small gathering of well-wishers, you have to wonder: is this sinewy empress of the air the city's best-kept secret?
Sure, everybody's heard about our wintry summers and that pretty bridge. But only in the rarefied world of dance is San Francisco known as the home of perhaps the most compelling ballerina of our time, a hazel-eyed daughter of a dancing family from Cuba, who, like her mother and her sister, Lorna (now a principal dancer with the Boston Ballet), learned her art from the legendary Alicia Alonso.
"Sultry, passionate, take-no-prisoners" is how Los Angeles Times dance critic Lewis Segal describes Feijóo. "She's one of the best dancers in America. Fiery and intense when she wants to be, technical when she wants to be. And she always stays womanly, never hard and impersonal."
And there's another unusual thing about Feijóo: she's not satisfied with just being a principal dancer at one of the premier ballet companies in the world. At 34, she has plenty of plié left in her robust legs, but right now she's about to burst onto a much bigger stage. This fall, Feijóo debuts in her first acting role, in The Lost City, directed by and starring Andy Garcia, along with Dustin Hoffman and Bill Murray. In the movie, set at that pivotal moment when Castro ascended and the Caribbean island playground became so much more...complicated, Feijóo plays the straw that stirs the drink, literally. That is, the image of Feijóo as the iconic dancer at Havana's famed Tropicana is carved on a swizzle stick Garcia's character gives her while they flirt in her dressing room.
Here's how it happened: at a postperformance gathering at Tosca, in a late-night conversation with the famous North Beach tavern's well-connected owner, Jeannette Etheredge, Feijóo mentioned her interest in acting.
"I didn't take it too seriously," Feijóo tells me over cosmos and gnocchi at the always boisterous Jardinière. But about a year after the Tosca conversation, Etheredge, a longtime fan of Feijóo's and a member of the San Francisco Film Commission, showed up at the ballet school. She'd just come from the nearby set of the thriller Twisted, where director Philip Kaufman had said he was looking for a flamenco dancer. "I know exactly the girl," Etheredge told him. So she found Feijóo in a rehearsal room and told her to come with her. "I'm rehearsing," Feijóo protested, but Etheredge wasn't deterred. "I know, come with me," she said. "I literally dragged her out of there in her pointe shoes and her little dance clothes, and we ran across the street to the set." Feijóo ended up turning down the flamenco role, but she met her fellow Cuban expatriate Andy Garcia, who was working on Twisted. The dancer and the actor bonded easily over their love and longing for Havana. Garcia had left with his parents at the age of 5; Feijóo left by herself at 20. She had already begun dancing principal roles, but in Cuba, there's little room for advancement, and Feijóo knew her best opportunity lay elsewhere. Still, abandoning Cuba was difficult.
"My main concern was my family," she says. "How I would miss them. It was my roots—my grandma, my mother, my sister. I was leaving everything behind."
"Everything" also included a certain broad fame that ballet dancers achieve in Cuba. Even at this early stage in her career, Feijóo already had a following in Havana. "I remember a group of people who would write down the dates I'd premiered things. And they really have a knowledge. They know when you're not feeling well and when you change a step."
After stints in Mexico, Belgium, and with the Joffrey Ballet in Chicago, Feijóo landed in San Francisco in 1999, where she has been thrilling audiences ever since. But there's no going back, and one senses that something is missing. "In Cuba," says Feijóo, "ballet is a big, big deal, like baseball. It's seen as a sport, and people understand it." Here, ballet fans are warm and loyal, but they attend in smaller numbers and reflect narrower demographics. Perhaps that's why Feijóo is attracted to the movies. Everyone goes to the movies, and movie love translates easily; if you make it big on the silver screen, everyone knows who you are.
That's where Andy Garcia comes in. A year after their impromptu meeting, Garcia saw Feijóo dance what might be her signature role, the tavern keeper's flirtatious daughter Kitri in Don Quixote. This magazine's dance critic, Paul Parish, described Feijóo's Don Q. entrance to me like this: "She just came in with this unbelievable, over-the-top energy. It's a little like Calamity Jane. Or as if Shirley Temple grew up into a woman with passion."
Garcia says he knew instantly that Feijóo was right for the role in his movie. And he's more than pleased with his decision. "Her instincts as an actress are right on the money," he says. "She could handle a much larger part than I had to offer."
Feijóo's happy, too, if for no other reason than the luxury of a second chance that film affords a performer. "Onstage, if you don't do it correctly, that's it, it's gone. But in film, if you don't like it, you can go back."
So is this the beginning of something new or just a delightful digression in a demanding career? "I'd love to do more acting," she says, but luckily for her fans, she has no immediate plans to cut back on her dancing. Still, given the seductive power of her stage presence, it's easy to imagine Feijóo making a full-time transition to film someday.
Indeed, I'd felt the draw even before we met for dinner, even before we'd met at all.
Two days earlier, we'd made eye contact across a crowded room, and I'd been certain she was flirting with me. She'd smiled, probably winked. I couldn't imagine what she saw in me, but I was moved, intrigued, was just beginning to consider the possibilities when the curtain fell, the performance ended, and I shuffled up the aisle with all the other thrilled ballet aficionados at a Saturday matinee. We were all abuzz, each of us convinced we'd been flirted with by those lovely hazel eyes.
It's the Lorena Feijóo experience, coming soon, one way or another, to a theater near you.
