The Royal Ballet’s Leanne Benjamin: Built for ballet
By Deborah Jones
“A dancer’s life may be glamorous in many ways, but there’s a huge amount of laundry,” writes Leanne Benjamin in her autobiography, Built for Ballet, published by Melbourne Books. The sentence neatly sums up the highs and lows of her art. The adrenalin rush of performing, rapturous applause, and after-party mingling with royalty are all part of the rich tapestry, the weft if you like. The warp — the base — is the immense amount of behind-scenes work it takes to achieve success and keep it, including but definitely not limited to lots of laundry.
Benjamin could have written an autobiography that was tightly focused on what the public saw, a life onstage remarkable for its impact and longevity. She had two decades at the top of the Royal Ballet, starred in all the big ballets, worked with world’s best choreographers, and bowed out on her own terms when she was 49.
Her book covers that, of course, but Benjamin carefully puts the glamour into a wider context. She isn’t interested in writing about her life as a kind of extreme event but as a study of how character, personality, upbringing, work ethic, and much else affect the progress of a career.
For this we can thank Rockhampton, in Central Queensland, where Benjamin was born in 1964. If Benjamin was built for ballet, it was Rocky that laid the sturdy, exceptionally long-lasting foundations. Benjamin paints an engaging picture of 1960s small-town Australia when it was possible to be a free-range child. “We were always in and out of one another’s houses” and there was, she writes, “a real sense of togetherness and care.”
Benjamin grew up strong, healthy, and independent in a family that thought you should be able to sort out your own problems. She took ballet classes from the age of three and became passionate about dance, but not to the exclusion of everything else. When she moved to London at 16 to study at the Royal Ballet School she had seen hardly any professional ballet.
She was also “trying to navigate a career that asked for obedience and conformity — not qualities I am known for.” One of her Royal Ballet School teachers noted on a report that she was “stubborn.” Undoubtedly so.
The fact that Benjamin worked in three other leading companies before joining the Royal Ballet gives some indication of the struggle to find her place, although it must be noted she was in the top rank of every one of them, her first promotion to principal artist coming at the age of 22.
Despite that early affirmation, Benjamin never became cocky, a quality that permeates Built for Ballet. The Rocky roots go deep. Benjamin is happy to point out her less shining hours if there’s some value to be gained from the telling, and when she describes the many triumphs it’s with restraint and generosity.
Benjamin was never a slave to the mirror — many dancers are, to their detriment. She always preferred, and as a ballet coach these days still does, to concentrate on meaning and connection rather than reflected shapes.
A brief vignette is revealing. After a long period of working with many different partners Benjamin found a brilliant and sympathetic collaborator in a dancer as individual as herself, Royal Ballet principal Edward Watson. They found a rapport that transcended movement. Watson, when once asked what he remembered about a show, said: “Well, I remember seeing Benji’s face.”
Benjamin quite reasonably thought she might stop dancing when she was about 40 but, after giving birth to her son Thomas at age 38, she just kept on getting better. In her final decade of performing she wisely put aside the Odettes, Auroras, and Sugar Plum Fairies in favour of Kenneth Macmillan’s powerful dramas and Wayne McGregor’s extraordinarily difficult contemporary work, in which she was extraordinary.
When Benjamin retired from the stage in 2013 it was front-page news in Rockhampton’s Morning Bulletin. Forty-five years earlier the paper had celebrated the four-year-old’s eisteddfod performance of Animal Crackers in My Soup with a photo and a headline that read: “The Tiniest Competitor.” Benjamin seems just as pleased about these accolades as she does about honours bestowed by the British and Australian governments and her honorary doctorate.
Built for Ballet is part of a burgeoning corner of publishing devoted to dance memoirs. Leanne Benjamin’s account of her life and work, written with British journalist Sarah Crompton, is a thoughtful and absorbing addition to the list.
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