She’s a former principal dancer, to be precise, but a lauded figure in the international ballet scene and a prodigal Queenslander, no less.

Leanne Benjamin has come home – after four decades in the UK and an astonishing 21 years as a principal artist for The Royal Ballet – to fill the significant pointe shoes of Li Cunxin.

Rockhampton-raised Benjamin began as artistic director of Queensland Ballet on February 12, following the departure, due to ill health, of the enigmatic man also known as Mao’s Last Dancer.

Li, previously recognised by The Courier-Mail as one of Queensland’s most powerful people – largely because of his “unparalleled ability to extract endless millions from the state government” and wealthy donors including Gina Rinehart – transformed the Brisbane-based outfit into “the envy of ballet companies throughout Australia”.

And now, eyes will be on Benjamin – the first female to hold the role – to see what she does next.

In studio two, as black-clad workers scurry below in the $100m showpiece headquarters of Li’s making, the 59-year-old is firmly focused on the task at hand.

She knows how to work the camera and is no stranger to the spotlight, having been dubbed the Benjamin Button of ballet by the UK press for her seemingly ageless agility and performance stamina.

Retiring from dancing at age 49 and spending several of the past 10 years as guest coach of The Royal Ballet in London – which brought stints in the US and Europe as well – she is primed for the fresh challenge ahead.

Slipping into a seat in the foyer after the photo shoot, Benjamin smiles and says: “I’ve loosened up a bit.”

As she speaks, in a cultured British accent that belies her upbringing, it is clear that moving back to Australia has been both professionally exciting and personally difficult.

For a start, she’ll be here without her partner of 28 years, husband Tobias Round, a theatre producer and artist manager, and their 20-year-old son Thomas, who has just written and staged his first play in London’s West End.

“It’s going to be really tricky,” Benjamin says.

“There’ll be phone calls and Skype, and lots of crying – I’m not really a crier. “While this is a great opportunity it definitely comes at a cost, but that’s how strongly I felt about Queensland; Queensland has always been very, very important to me, even before this job was even a twinkle in my eye.”

In fact, when Benjamin heard about Li’s impending departure, she began contacting peers she thought would be perfect for the role.

“I won’t name names, but I was saying, ‘you should think about this job’, and they were coming back to me and saying, ‘YOU should think about this job’.

“Then it was when I spoke to Kevin (O’Hare, director of The Royal Ballet) and he said, ‘this is your job’ – and what an amazing director to say that – and I was like, ‘no, no’, and he said, ‘I think you should take a look’, because he knows me better than I know myself.”

Benjamin and O’Hare have been friends since dancing together at Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet (now Birmingham Royal Ballet) back in the 1980s.

“Kevin said, ‘you’re ready, you’re ready’, then it was my son who said, ‘Mum, what you’re doing now is not the end of your story… and that was it.”

How it all started

Leanne Benjamin began dancing at age three, the second eldest of four children to Bernie and Jill Benjamin, well-known folk in Rocky who ran Colonial Cottage Antiques.

The young Benjamin took lessons from Valeria Hansen, who also taught Li’s wife Mary McKendry, and by her teenage years at The Range Convent and High School her dreams had grown global.

Her parents initially hoped she would join The Australian Ballet in Melbourne, but Benjamin had her sights on London. Sister Madonna, two years her senior, had been accepted by The Royal Ballet, and Benjamin wanted to follow.

“I was very fortunate that I was noticed at a young age,” she explains.

“How did I get noticed? In those days, well, yeah, good question. A few photographs were taken in my ballet studio, all terrible angles and everything, but obviously they just saw something in me.

“It was pot luck really. Mum and Dad sent them off to The Royal Ballet, and I left home at 16 with one suitcase.”

Benjamin says her sister “struggled a bit more with the profession and decided to stop” – she went on to study at Oxford University and is now a senior commissioning editor for UK’s Channel 4 Television.

“I’m going to miss her terribly, we’ve been through thick and thin,” Benjamin says.

Accepted into the Royal Ballet School in 1980, Benjamin won the Adeline Genee Competition Gold Medal (judges included the legendary Phyllis Bedells and Margot Fonteyn) and the Prix de Lausanne the following year.

In 1982, she danced Giselle at The Royal Opera House and, at age 18, joined Sadler’s Wells, becoming principal dancer in 1986, before moving to the English National Ballet and then the Deutsche Opera Ballet in Berlin.

It was in Germany she met the renowned late choreographer Kenneth MacMillan, who invited her to join The Royal Ballet – setting in motion a phenomenal career in which she danced almost every lead role in the company’s repertoire.

But Benjamin, awarded an OBE in recognition of her services to dance in 2005, never lost touch with her roots.

In 2006, her exceptional technique and physical brilliance were captured by English photographer Jason Bell, on a dry and dusty road in Alice Springs.

The Royal Opera House had commissioned portraits for a marketing campaign called A World Stage, in which artists were shot in places they felt represented them.

Her colleague Darcey Bussell opted for the white cliffs of Dover, while Benjamin chose Uluru, and a red dress inspired by her role in Igor Stravinsky’s The Firebird.

When permission was denied to shoot at the rock, Bell roped in a local truckie to drive back and forth while he and Benjamin battled 40-degree heat to nail the shot.

Benjamin recalls the experience in her 2021 autobiography, Built for Ballet: “There was no trampoline, and no special effects – it was me, launching myself into the sky, in touch with the red, red earth of my beloved country.”

The romance

The blinding lights of New York were the backdrop for the blossoming love affair between Leanne Benjamin and Tobias Round.

It was 1995 and Benjamin, performing for The Royal Ballet at The Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Centre, was doing an interview for an American dance magazine.

Roy Round, Tobias’s father, was the photographer. A celebrity in his own right, Round (who died in 2017, aged 88) shot some of the biggest names of his era, including Rudolf Nureyev, Sean Connery, Raquel Welch, Tom Jones, Yves Saint Laurent and Queen Elizabeth II. He was married to Georgina Parkinson, Tobias’s mother and a principal with The Royal Ballet from 1962.

It was Parkinson (who died in 2009, aged 71) who moved the family to the US after being asked by MacMillan to teach Mikhail Baryshnikov the role of Romeo for the 1977 film The Turning Point. She was invited to stay on as ballet mistress to the American Ballet Theatre.

The worlds of Leanne Benjamin and Tobias Round were bound to align – although their first encounter was less than smooth. “It’s a terrible story,” Benjamin says, recalling the photo shoot.

“Tobias was evidently helping his father, but I thought he was just standing staring and I was in a little leotard and I felt very uncomfortable and asked if he would leave, not realising that I was asking him to leave his own house.

“So he was not happy with me at all.”

The pair did not meet again until the following year when Benjamin told him she loved his father’s photographs, and the relationship took off from there.

Today, their family home is in Ladbroke Grove – “the grungy end of Portobello Rd” – but when people ask Round where he’s going to live now his wife is in Australia (her contract is for four years), he replies: “Hopefully in a very nice business class lounge.”

Benjamin says despite the geographic distance, she and Round will continue to support each other professionally as well as personally.

“We’re in different aspects of the same world – the arts – and always our table talk is just about the big picture,” she says.

Round, 52, represents several renowned choreographers, including Christopher Wheeldon, Alexei Ratmansky and Cathy Marston.

“He comes from pedigree,” Benjamin says. “His mum was a ballerina with The Royal Ballet and he knew Rudolf (Nureyev) and Baryshnikov well.

“It was very useful when I was overseas recently speaking to choreographers and gathering information about what I’ll do with the 2025 season, which will be my first curated season here, so that’s all exciting and daunting.”

What’s to come?

So what can ballet aficionados expect from Queensland Ballet under its new artistic director?

“I’ll be looking at every aspect of the next season and how to have a very wide portfolio, how I will bring in some new voices to the company, and how I take a company that’s working well and give it the best relevancy to date,” she says.

Leveraging her international connections will be crucial to Benjamin’s direction of Queensland Ballet – and offer exciting collaborative opportunities for local talent.

“I feel very fortunate that I have strong relationships with so many great artists around the world … choreographers, dancers, stagers, designers, musicians … so I’m hoping they’re going to say yes,” she says. “No names at this moment, watch this space.”

Benjamin acknowledges the “sad loss” to the company of principal artists Mia Heathcote and Victor Estevez who have joined The Australian Ballet but hopes they’ll return “when they are ready, even as guests”.

“I’ve got a couple of replacements coming in,” she says, “and I believe it’s very difficult to find men in Australia at the moment, something happened since the pandemic, there was that gap where people weren’t in the studio and it has affected this new generation today.”

Benjamin herself has had a gap in her ballet career. After retiring from dancing in 2013, she decided to try a new challenge.

“I went to study architectural design (at London’s University of the Arts) and literally was not going to do anything in ballet at all – I was done,” she explains. “When I was finishing my career I had already started private lessons in drawing so I’d swapped my pointe shoe bag for a drawing briefcase, and I was off to uni with kids half my age.

“But I’ve never been afraid of things like that – like having braces when I was kid; I had the full head braces but Mum just said, ‘she’ll be fine’, and I was.”

Benjamin is grateful for the few years she took a break from ballet. “I was really glad to have space – I think it’s really important to have that after doing something with such intensity for so long, training non-stop, until the end, at the highest level,” she says.

If not for the “warmth” shown by The Royal Ballet’s Kevin O’Hare and luring her back as a guest coach, Benjamin might never have returned to ballet.

“It took me a long time to adapt to the traditional English way and, of course, the company had changed so much over the years and that is one of the reasons I went back – under Kevin there was so much warmth.

“It’s also why I’m here – the warmth of the people and everyone I’ve met.”

When beginning to contemplate the artistic director role mid last year, Benjamin flew up from Sydney where she was visiting family (her parents relocated 10 years ago to be closer to son Tony Benjamin and daughter Fiona Malek).

Her first impression of the Thomas Dixon Centre was “wow”.

“I got out of the cab and thought, oh my goodness, this is great and it feels great in here, such a wonderful atmosphere and so open and welcoming.”

And during her first official week in February, that welcome came in a
nostalgic form.

“All these wonderful ladies here gave me tea the other day, you know, they laid it out like a tea party in Rockhampton and they had all those biscuits I hadn’t seen for ages and they handmade things, I was really chuffed,” she says. “Everyone has been incredibly welcoming, including (from) the other arts organisations.”

Benjamin knows the high esteem in which her predecessor Li Cunxin was held.

“For whomever to come in – I know, I know, it’s big shoes to fill, I’m very aware of that, but I’ve never been afraid of a challenge; I just like to roll my sleeves up, and do my darned best,” she says. “I’m honoured to be Queensland Ballet’s first female artistic director.

“There have been some hugely inspirational women who have gone before me in the
ballet world, including the founder of The
Royal Ballet (Ninette de Valois) and founding artistic director of The Australian Ballet (Peggy van Praagh).

“My hope is I’ll be as great a leader as they were and bring the same gusto and artistic flair.”

In her second week on the job, Benjamin flew to Canberra to talk about funding with the federal government, something Li was passionate about increasing.

In one of his last official engagements, in November 2023, Li repeated his call for funding parity with other states.

He said despite Queensland Ballet becoming the second largest of the five major dance companies in the country, it received the least funding from the commonwealth – and none for its dance academy, unlike NSW and Victoria.

Private donors are relied upon for support, with less than 3 per cent of Queensland Ballet’s annual revenue being federal and 20 per cent state. Benjamin – who served as vice-chair on the board of governors of The Royal Ballet Companies – says she is on a “very steep learning curve”.

“The company has developed and grown, we’re a company that is making a difference and will keep doing so hopefully under my leadership, but with great ideas comes money – you can’t just dream big without the funding,” she says.

“I’m slowly hearing about what goes on politically and financially because, of course, my love is the dancers and being in the studio and when that curtain opens, you’re only as good as what happens on the stage.”

Benjamin, made a Member of the Order of Australia in 2015, said communication would be central to her management style.

“I’m very communicative with everybody, very open, and an open-door policy is really important – not to be bombarded but to get to know the dancers – and I feel that if you’re comfortable as a person you will perform better, in whatever you do in your life,” she says.

“If I felt restricted by someone or I wasn’t able to talk about something it just festers inside and then you can see it on the stage – dancers don’t project in the same way.”

Benjamin says as well as caring for young dancers at the pivotal ages of 15 to 17 when they are deciding “whether to jump in” as a career, she also wants to support the teachers who face immense pressure and “sometimes that gets forgotten in companies”.

Above all, she plans to take a holistic and considered approach to Queensland Ballet.

“My mission is to look after and develop Australian choreographers but also bring in the best and brightest from around the world, because the dancers deserve to work and feed themselves, and the audiences as well.

“I want to know that if I’m making a change it’s for the right reasons; I want to keep what’s great and if something needs changing or moving on, that’s where I will step in.” ■