En el Chicago Tribune salió esta semana una hermosa nota sobre la pareja simbiótica que Julio Bocca y Alessandra Ferri formaban (me duele hablar en pasado...).

THE POWER OF TWO

Soloists may dazzle, but only duets can tell a good love story

By Sid Smith

Individual dancers are the stuff of legend: Anna Pavlova, Isadora Duncan, Martha Graham, Mikhail Baryshnikov.

But the art of dance has been described as making love while standing up, and it's unlikely that folklore is referring to a soloist. There is a special affinity known only to a handful of partnerships: Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn.

In ballet, in the years since Nureyev and Fonteyn, we've become accustomed not to expect that kind of electrifying onstage partnership. We arrive at the concert hall poised to look for the luster of lone stars, not the sparks of sizzling duos. Ours is the era of mono-dance.

In March 1992, I settled into my seat at the Civic Opera House prepared to watch "Romeo and Juliet" starring two dancers whose individual work I knew: Julio Bocca, the youthful, hot-blooded Argentine and heir, for a spell, to Baryshnikov's technical prowess, and Alessandra Ferri, a raven-haired Italian ballerina whose many partnerships included Nureyev, Anthony Dowell and Baryshnikov, responsible for luring her to American Ballet Theatre in the late '80s.

Both dancers were among the most prominent artists of their day, accomplished in technique and silky in style. I expected professional zeal. But nothing prepared me for that performance.

Beginning in the balcony scene, maybe the most romantic in all of ballet, they morphed into a whole superior to their two parts. Their technical prowess helped, not to mention their mutual flair for eroticism. But it was something else, too, some volcanic heat bursting forth and then spreading gently outward like an ethereal blanket. The languorous longing with which she inflected her dancing, the heightened alertness of his dashing flights across stage, the super-real desperation of their clutch-all of it transcended the artifice of ballet and evoked the private world of two adolescents in the rapture of infatuation.

On stage, they were, in the most sublime sense of the phrase, making love.

La nota sigue aquí.

Gracias a Anna por enviarme la información