Treasure Island performance artist Alice Ferrulo is the owner of Black Horse Theatre, a St. Petersburg Theater company.
Alice Ferrulo
Once a year, Black Horse Theater mounts a production that aims to reveal a raw human state of being.
It’s always the work of performance artist and Black Horse Theater owner Alice Ferrulo, and after a COVID-19-induced halt in 2020, this former ballerina is ready to get back in the swing of things.
She calls it “Something Blue,” and plans to debut her show at the ArtsXchange in June 2023.
It’s a play on the wedding phrase, “something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue,” and will work as an art exhibit paired with performances from Ferrulo, dancers from Tampa Ballet Company, and other performance artists.
The display will use only one color – blue, and have themes ranging from water to sadness.
“I’m very interested in looking at the world from a different angle and portraying that,” Ferrulo said.
Ferrulo has starred in many local performances, including her own theater piece, Tied at Studio@620 in 2019, and Victoria Jorgenson’s Landemic film exhibit.
She’s a familiar face in the St. Pete arts world, but this is a discovered home for Ferrulo.
Where did the dancer grow up?
“I’ve lived in so many different places, I don’t really know where to call home,” Ferrulo told The Gabber.
She was born in Erie, Pennsylvania before her family moved to Europe. At age 8, Ferrulo lived in Copenhagen, Denmark when her mother saw an ad for ballet auditions at the World Danish Ballet. The Pennsylvania-born child had no previous dance experience, and no ballet equipment. Nonetheless, the family nanny took her to the Danish audition where Ferrulo wore a bathing suit and hoped for the best.
“I was one of the first accepted,” Ferrulo said. “It took incredible discipline. I spoke English, the language of ballet is French, and the school was in Denmark. That’s probably why I’m so visual today.”
Ferrulo later joined Paris- and New York-based Calck Hook Dance Theater and New York-based Blondell Cummings and Dancers. In the late ‘80s, she supervised the telemarketing department of New York’s Metropolitan Opera. She eventually moved to Tampa where she taught dance professionally, among other things.
In 2006, Ferrulo found herself in St. Petersburg with the time and ability to focus on her work. She opened Black Horse Theater as an umbrella company for her exhibits, performances, and theater.
She’s a former ballerina at the World Danish Ballet in Denmark. “There’s nothing like live performance,” Ferrulo said.
Alice Ferrulo
“There’s so many ways to categorize what one does; I’m an image maker,” Ferrulo said. “I think for me it’s designing images that are powerful, real.”
As raw and dark as her work gets, it’s never gothic.
“I think it’s [Black Horse Theater] dark in reference to the absurd,” Ferrulo said. “What is dark in life, what is dark in human beauty. A lot of art doesn’t like to examine that, but I do.”
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