Antonia Franceschi: 'This is it, this is my place...'

For Antonia Franceschi, dance was an escape from a traumatic childhood

Street gangs, subway violence, parental neglect, rape. Most kids who manage to survive such an urban assault course would be happy to bury the memory in adulthood. Not so Antonia Franceschi – ex-New York City Ballet dancer, who as a teenager featured in the movies Grease and Fame, faking a birth certificate so she could go to Hollywood at 16. Now 40, she long ago did all the therapy and laid the ghosts to rest. But still, clearly, things remain to be said. Re-settled in London, and much in demand as a freelance dancer/choreographer with a lean, lightning-streak technique, she has turned her experiences of growing up in 1970s Manhattan into theatre.

Developed with the National Theatre Studio, and under the advisory eye of Bent playwright Martin Sherman, Up From the Waste combines rap, original music by Gary Yershon, an unflinching poetic text delivered by the actress Clare Holman, and ballet performed by Franceschi and three extraordinary-looking American men. The idea for the piece, she says, first came to her in the shower, when a voice in her head asked: "What was it like for you in Manhattan. What was it like growing up?"

Where a less driven mortal would have mused on the matter and let it lie, Franceschi towelled off, dug out the videocam and recorded a monologue – a vividly remembered story about the mixture of bluster and raw fear she felt when fending off unwelcome advances on the subway aged 11. Later that same night, she woke up at 3am and recorded another episode. "From that point on," she says, "my whole life started coming back to me, in poetic form. There was no connection between the monologues. They were all experiences I'd had, but not always narrated in the first person."

Oddly, and perhaps a little coyly, Franceschi insists that the show's story isn't directly about herself. "It's about being in a difficult situation, in a difficult part of the world, and how anyone might deal with that. We all of us start from some kind of situation, good or bad. It's what you do with it that counts."

Certainly, for many years, Franceschi's situation looked far from promising. She had arrived in Manhattan aged eight with her brother and recently divorced mother, who, sapped by depression and financial difficulties, seems rarely to have emerged from her bed. Franceschi coped, in a fashion, by joining the local street gang, who offered the kind of protection that was more or less essential in a run-down neighbourhood. There was also the weekly ballet class, a long and risky subway-ride away on 14th Street, made more risky by the fact that Franceschi felt compelled to keep the activity secret. "If a gang knows that you're working on a way out, they get pissed off. And if you're outside the gang's protection, you're gonna get beat up, or you're gonna get raped."

What saved her, she says, was that, "even at such a young age, I saw the value of work. I saw that if I worked, I might earn some kind of security. And, you know, if you've had trauma in your life, or suffered, it allows you to go that bit further in your art. You've learnt how to remove yourself from pain." Later, as a student at the American School of Ballet (paying her own way on fees earned in the movies), and as a professional in Balanchine's company, Franceschi regularly used to finish rehearsals with her toes bleeding, having not even registered the pain.

But Up From the Waste – "Pull up from the waist" was her ballet teacher's mantra – is more than just a regurgitation of teenage memories. The alternating episodes of monologue and dance – "a seamless journey of the abstract and the particular", its creator hopes – also tackle some fairly complex ideas about emotional violence in adulthood, and even within the art of ballet itself.

"It's all about power-ratios," says Franceschi. "When you're very young, the issues are clear cut. If you're 12 and the guy's 27 and he wants to rape you, that's wrong, end of story. But say you're in a rehearsal and being screamed at by someone saying: 'Why can't you remember what I asked you to do? Are you retarded? Do you have your period? Why do you look like shit?', you don't answer back, you go on till you get it right. Anyone in the real world would say 'Fuck you'. But as a dancer you do it again because you have no place else to go. This is it, this is your place. And the reason you put up with it is for the sake of that one gorgeous moment on stage. On stage nobody can touch you. On stage you can show your love, your purity, show whatever, and no one can take advantage."

So is Franceschi taking a swipe at the traditional ballet hierarchy? Is she saying it's run by sadists and mysogynists? Indirectly, yes. There is one identifiable dance personality in the work, she says, but it's not George Balanchine (a famous womaniser and fetishiser of dancers' bodies), and it's not Jerome Robbins either. "I'm not saying who it is. I don't want to get sued. But some people will figure it out anyway."

'Up From the Waste': The Albany, London SE8 (020 8692 4446), Tues to 8 Dec; tours