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Over the course of the past
decade, Lorena Feijóo has become widely acclaimed as
one of the most celebrated ballerinas of her
generation. The Havana native has performed with
many of the world’s top-flight ballet companies and
has been hailed by leading critics as one of the
demanding art form’s most accomplished new stars.
Since the arrival in the United States five years
ago of Lorena’s younger sister Lorna, also an
internationally renowned ballerina, the Feijóos have
been treated like veritable princesses of the ballet
world and lavished with praise by the media and
ballet patrons alike.
 But
during a recent performance of Vivaldi’s The Four
Seasons at San Francisco’s regal War Memorial Opera
House, Lorena experienced something she had never
before encountered while on stage—a chorus of boos.
“It was really something,” she recalls today with a
hearty laugh. “On one side, the audience was
applauding. On the other, people were booing. It was
an amazing sensation.”
The reason for the verbal disapproval by some in
attendance of the San Francisco Opera’s performance
that night had nothing to do with Lorena’s
performance—it was provoked by the inclusion of a
jarring, contemporary interpretation of Vivaldi’s
well-known music theme. But it was a reminder to
Lorena, by now long accustomed to the reassuring,
day-in, day-out routine that governs the life of
most ballet artists, to be prepared for the totally
unexpected.
Ballet purists go out of their way to catch either
of the Feijóo sisters in action—Lorena, with San
Francisco Ballet, where she has been a principal
dancer since 1999, and Lorna, with Boston Ballet,
where she has been a principal dancer for the past
three seasons. Together, they form the only prima
ballerina sister combo ever. On the single occasion
when they actually danced together in the same
production, they created a truly magical moment in
ballet history and put their personal stamp forever
on one of the tradition’s great classics.
It was in the spring of 2004, and Boston Ballet had
Swan Lake on its schedule. “My season in San
Francisco was over,” Lorena says. “A friend said,
‘Wouldn’t it be fun if you went to Boston and did
Swan Lake and shared it with Lorna?’ I called her
and said, ‘Listen, we’ve never danced together, and
I’m off, and you are still working. So ... ’ She
loved the idea and took it to her director, who is a
really open-minded person. He knew me because he
used to dance in San Francisco, and he’s open to new
and exciting experiences. Believe me, most of the
time, directors are very conservative.”
 The
performance that electrified the dance world
featured Lorna in the role of Odette, the white swan,
and Lorena as Odile, the black swan. The novelty of
two sisters doing what had never been done before by
siblings, coupled with their sensuous presence and
flawless performance, rocketed the Feijóo sisters’
careers into an even higher orbit.
For both young women, the path to stardom began in
Cuba, where they were born into a family that traces
its roots to the Galicia region of Spain. Urged on
by their mother Lupe, herself a dancer and
choreographer, they studied at the country’s
national ballet school in Havana, benefiting from
decades of experience brought to the grueling daily
practice sessions by Cuba’s legendary prima
ballerina, Alicia Alonzo. “There’s no doubt that I
am where I am today because I was born in Cuba,”
says Lorna. “We have one of the best schools in the
world. I’m here in Boston today because of what I
learned in Cuba.”
Both Lorna and Lorena recall endless days of ballet
instruction, French language lessons, and classes in
acrobatics, history, geography, music and other
study areas. “Every year they have tests,” Lorna
says, “and if you are doing great in ballet but not
so well in some of the other areas, you need to
repeat the year. So it’s very important that you get
high marks in all of the areas.”
Because they are separated in age by almost four
years, the sisters spent relatively little time with
each other while in school in Cuba. While Lorna
stayed on with the national ballet company for most
of the ’90s, Lorena left her homeland at the
beginning of the decade to seek professional
challenges elsewhere. She danced with Mexico’s
Ballet de Monterrey, the Royal Ballet of Flanders,
and, in 1995, the Ballet of Los Angeles, which she
helped found. Before joining the San Francisco
company in 1999, she performed as a principal dancer
with Chicago’s famed Joffrey Ballet, where she
learned one of life’s tough lessons: Knowing when to
move on.
“After four years with Joffrey, I said ‘I’m done,’”
Lorena says. “When the company starts repeating a
lot of the repertoire that you’ve done before, you
feel like you aren’t growing. I was repeating the
same pieces. It very much depends on the vision of
the director.”
In San Francisco, Lorena has found a supporting
environment and a ballet organization not afraid to
try new things. “The audience here is very
knowledgeable there—they’ve been going to the ballet
forever,” she says. “They comprehend all of the
finer points of the technique. And ballet is very
popular; when my mother came here, she was really
surprised that the theater is packed on week nights
and weekend matinees.” Her success in San Francisco
was underscored in 2004 when she and her Cuban dance
partner Joan Boada won the Isadora Duncan Dance
Award for their performance of production of Don
Quixote.
 Lorna
left Cuba in 2001 and since has performed with some
of the elite ballets of the world, including
London’s Royal Ballet, La Scala de Milano Ballet,
and the Zurich Opera Ballet. She performed with the
Cincinnati Ballet for two years before joining
Boston Ballet in 2004.
Although separated by a continent, the lives of the
two sisters are connected in a number of ways.
“Sometimes people send me Lorna’s reviews, because
our names are so similar,” Lorena says.
The relationship has always been about mutual
support, not competition. “No, we never feel that we
are competing with one another,” Lorna adds. “I’ve
learned a lot of things from my sister. She’s my
inspiration to dance. If we have competition, it’s
always positive. For instance, if she sees something
that I’ve done that’s wrong, she tells me, and at
the same time I tell her, but it’s always to help.
For us, family is the most important thing in the
world. We talk on the phone all the time. I’ll ask
her for advice when I’m working on a new ballet. And
it’s the same for her.”
One thing that’s never far from their minds is the
risk of personal injury that could end their careers
in an instant. “You can be in great shape and still
get injured; you never know when it might happen,
and when it does, it can risk everything you’ve
worked for,” says Lorna. “Your muscles need to be
ready, like sports people, to be able to kick high
and jump,” adds Lorena. “When you are young, you
think, ‘Oh, I don’t need to warm up so much—I’ll
just stretch here and there.’ And then when you’re
on stage, you get so exhausted because you’re really
pushing on a cold muscle.”
Diet is also on their mind. “Latina women have
different bodies, not like the European women,”
Lorna says. “They can be very skinny with long legs.
In the beginning at the school, I had a lot of
problems, because when I eat the wrong things, I can
get fat really quickly. Now I don’t eat red meat,
but a lot of fruits and vegetables. And lots of
water is so important.”
While they would seem the perfect role models for
young Latinas, the Feijóo sisters have yet to
produce a wave of excitement in the traditional
Spanish language media. Their petite, trim forms and
disciplined lives, it seems, don’t push the right
buttons. “Whenever we try to expand their horizons,”
complains a male colleague, “especially in the
Spanish market, the comments are always along the
lines of: ‘They are not busty enough,’ ‘They need to
be prettier,’ ‘Too bad they don’t have a bigger tush,’
and ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to see them in a bikini?’
The last comment always is, ‘Do they have a famous
macho boyfriend?’”
 Loren
is married to dancer Nelson Madrigal, also Cuban and
a principal dancer with Boston Ballet. And Lorena
spends as much time with her cats Sidney and Mambo
as she does with her boyfriend. But both women are
getting a taste of the bright light beyond ballet.
Lorna has already been featured in the documentary
film Dance Cuba: Dreams of Flight, in which she
performs the lead role in Swan Lake. And Lorena is
featured in The Lost City, a film set in Cuba during
the tumultuous 1950s, directed by and starring Andy
Garcia and boasting a cast of such notables as
Dustin Hoffman, Bill Murray and a host of up-and-coming
Latino actors.
The day Lorena met Garcia for the first time—“Oh,
she’s so lucky,” swoons Lorna—played out like a
scene from a movie itself. “He was in San Francisco,
doing a film, and said he wanted to meet a Cuban
dancer,” she says. “Someone knew we were rehearsing
right across the street, came over and got me. I
didn’t have time to change; I went in my tutu and
ballet slippers!”
Making a transition to film work is something both
sisters believe might be in their future. After all,
as Lorna points out, “In ballet, you are really
acting all of the time, as we do a lot of mime and
pantomime.” But in the meantime, both are enjoying
the fruits of their success and trying to find a
spare hour here and there to let their hair down and
relax on their own terms. For Lorna, it’s salsa
dancing in Boston clubs. For Lorena, it’s cooking.
“My mother says I should open a restaurant here in
San Francisco,” she says in a manner that suggests
the idea is more than just a pipe dream. “You know,
there really isn’t a Cuban restaurant here that’s
put it all together. Maybe it‘s time.”
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