Leanne Benjamin’s giant leap from Rockhampton to Royal Ballet star
Rockhampton girl Leanne Benjamin took a leap into the unknown – and landed as a star of the Royal Ballet.
I open the door from the narrow street and walk into another world. It isn’t particularly smart or especially glamorous. There’s a reception desk to one side and a security door ahead of me. Both are battered by constant use. Only the bouquets of flowers in one corner are a clue to the fact that this is the Royal Opera House, home to Britain’s Royal Ballet, a place where every night ambition and imagination come together to make dreams come true. A place of entertainment and fantasy and grinding hard work. A building that has been my second home.
I first performed professionally on this stage when I was 17 and an anxious student at the Royal Ballet School. I was playing the tiny walk-on role of the Bride in Romeo and Juliet and I was nervous. I described the experience in a letter to my Aunty Pat in Rockhampton, complaining that my costume was at least six inches too long. “I thought I was going to ruin the whole ballet by tripping onto the stage instead of walking!”
Right up until my retirement as a principal ballerina at 49, in 2013, I wasn’t happy when costumes made me uncomfortable. I danced all the famous women of classical ballet: the doomed Odette in Swan Lake, the tragic peasant girl Giselle, the sparkling Sugar Plum Fairy, and Aurora in The Sleeping Beauty. But the characters I loved best were those who didn’t need a tutu and pink tights; they were the heroines of ballets by choreographers such as Kenneth MacMillan, women with real emotions and passions, flawed and fabulous, with a bit of personality and a lot of spirit. Or abstract roles, where you had to twist your body into the most outlandish shapes or communicate feeling by a stretch of the neck or the shape of your arm.
I never liked pulling on a frilly skirt or wearing a wig. I wanted to strip down to basics, to wear a body stocking, or a simple costume, and revel in the pure joy of free movement, expressing my feelings with every inch of my body. Maybe that springs from one of the most important things about me: I never wanted to be a ballerina.
It was my sister Madonna who pored over photos of Margot Fonteyn when we were growing up in Rockhampton. It was Madonna who had the perfect bun and the graceful deportment. I was the kid with my hair falling down my back, bouncing around on a pogo stick, screeching with laughter and playing tricks on my neighbours. You can tell the kind of girl I was by the fact that one morning I turned up for dance class – where everyone was in black leotards and pink shoes – dressed as the Easter Bunny, trotting round the studio complete with ears, handing out eggs, and then joining in the lesson as if nothing had happened.
But somehow ballet wormed its way into my life. Getting up for a 6.30am class with Miss Valeria Hansen every day was as much a part of my teenage years as barbecues and swimming in the ocean. I was built for ballet – tiny and strong, with long legs and arms and unquenchable energy – and I loved getting into the studio to practise and to improve, to see where my body would take me. I just wanted to be the best I could be. That feeling pushed me a long, long way. I knew that if I wanted to achieve true excellence, I had to leave Rockhampton and travel halfway across the world.
These days, to be considered for the Royal Ballet School from Australia you have to send a 20-minute video and be prepared to travel to London for two days of auditions, interviews and a medical test. In my day, the process was considerably more primitive. I had to send photographs of myself in three positions, which were taken by a local photographer who stuck me on top of a table, next to the barre, presumably because it looked better to have the high windows behind me. He clearly didn’t know anything about dance, because that meant the whole angle of the shoot was dreadful and, I am amused to notice, draws attention to the fact that I have a ladder in my tights, which is just so typical of me.
Studying the photos now, with my teacher’s eye, I think they’re pretty terrible, but I’d want to see that girl. I’ve got a nice physique, good proportions and good muscles, and though my right finger is sticking out when my arms are meant to be gracefully curled above my head – a ballet fault I’ve worked on my whole life – I’m holding the pose quite well. But I do look young. I was 15, but I still look like a child: flat chested, with those coltish arms and legs.
Apparently, the school nearly didn’t take me, because I was so thin and they got in touch with Miss Hansen to say I looked great, but was I eating properly? She assured them I was, and I got my place in October 1979, which I’d take up in September the following year. When the letter arrived, I was jumping around the house. It was one of the great moments of my life.
When I arrive at the stage door nowadays, it’s as if my life is passing in front of my eyes. Now, I have to negotiate complicated security measures; once upon a time, I’d breeze in and out, and when my mum would ring from Rockhampton I’d be called to a draughty stage door to take the call. I feel 100 years old just for remembering those days.
But some things never change. The downstairs coffee bar, with its wonky tables and black plastic seats, is still a place to meet and chat. You never know who you might encounter in the queue: the world-famous baritone Bryn Terfel might be there, or the Royal Opera House’s music director Antonio Pappano. Perhaps I will meet an old friend such as Darcey Bussell, back like me to do a spot of teaching. Sometimes it’s empty or quiet, but when the opera chorus pour out from a general rehearsal it’s like a rugby scrum, so noisy you can’t hear yourself speak. The corps de ballet in contrast are so much more petite and delicate.
My favourite route to the floors above, where I will be coaching, is around the stage level because it gives me a chance to take a peek at whatever set is piled up behind the stage, with the crew getting it ready for the night’s performance, shifting scenery around on huge trolleys. There are names scrawled on the wings at the side of the stage: I always say good morning to Rudolf Nureyev, whose picture hangs to the right, an inspiration still. When the curtains to the auditorium are open, the red of the seats and the gold and white of the horseshoe-shaped tiers glint in the house lights. This is just about my favourite view in the world, so full of memories, good and bad: of nights when I didn’t want the curtain to come down and those – much more rare – when I couldn’t wait for a performance to end.
It still seems strange to me, as I make my way to the guest dressing room on the first floor, not to be heading for the principal changing room on the stage level that I shared with Tamara Rojo for many years, her side of the room immaculate, mine a chaotic mess. Before we moved in, Darcey Bussell and Miyako Yoshida used it as their dressing room. Now it’s occupied by Natalia Osipova and Lauren Cuthbertson, taking their part in that changing fabric of history that seeps into the walls of a big lyric theatre like this.
On a typical day on my way to the rehearsal rooms I’ll bump into Philip Mosley, senior character artist and artistic scheduling manager. I’ve known Phil forever and I adore him. He’s a roguish Yorkshireman with a strong accent and a wicked grin. It’s said he inspired the story of Billy Elliot, having made his way from a working-class family to the Royal Ballet School. Phil’s quirky manner conceals an iron grip of scheduling and a gift for people management. As a dancer, I drove him crazy, trying to squeeze in as many rehearsals as possible. If you’re going to be great onstage, you need time in a rehearsal room, and you don’t always get it. My insistence on that led to me getting a reputation as being difficult and I probably was sometimes, if I’m honest, but I needed it to be able to give the kind of performances I wanted.
When I arrived in London at 16, I was a guileless, passionate girl who had barely seen a ballet performance. Suddenly I was trying to navigate a career that asks for obedience and conformity – not qualities I am noted for. Perfectionism, yes. Hard work, definitely. But silent yes-saying, not so much. I like to have a laugh, to ask questions, to push the envelope. Those weren’t necessarily the qualities that people were looking for.
That temperament has made my life infinitely more interesting, but I’ve also had some missteps along the way. My career didn’t unfold like a beautifully curved satin ribbon, flying through the air in perfect waves as it does in Frederick Ashton’s La Fille Mal Gardée. It was definitely full of flight and excitement. By the time I was 28, I had been principal in four internationally renowned companies, and I then enjoyed 21 years as a star of the Royal Ballet. In that time I worked with so many fascinating people, from historical figures who built the foundations of British ballet, such as Ninette de Valois, Frederick Ashton and Kenneth MacMillan, to the dancers, directors and choreographers who are shaping the world of dance today: people such as Wayne McGregor, Christopher Wheeldon, Alexei Ratmansky and Carlos Acosta. The legendary Alicia Markova prepared me for my first role; the equally legendary Lynn Seymour passed on her wisdom to me about my final characterisation on the Royal Opera House stage.
Benjamin performs with Carlos Acosta in Kenneth MacMillan’s “The Judas Tree”, The Royal Ballet, 2010.
So many memories come flooding back as I push open the heavy door and walk into the Clore. This is the theatre studio where I struggled to get my head around the fierce geometries of Wayne McGregor’s choreography, when he created a role for me in Qualia just three months after I’d given birth to my son Thomas in 2003. I remember the difficulty of trying to remind my body how to dance again, and cramming my feet back into pointe shoes after months of freedom, but I also recall the sheer physical excitement of wrapping my limbs around movement that was quite unlike anything I had ever experienced.
My first rehearsals for Polyphonia, a complicated piece by Christopher Wheeldon, were also in this room; there was one moment when the cameras came to film us for World Ballet Day. They arrived just as we were working on a section of duets in unison, and we couldn’t get it right, stopping and starting over and over again while the pianist patiently repeated the same few phrases. I wonder what on Earth people felt as they watched, but at least it gave them an insight into all the discipline and struggle that lies behind a dancer’s apparently glamorous existence.
I’ve had such an amazing life, travelling from the Outback to Buckingham Palace, from obscurity to the top of my chosen profession. I’ve seen ballet shift from a profession that would have been recognisable to its 19th-century practitioners, where dancers had to be seen but definitely not heard, to one that is looking proudly forward in the 21st century by giving the performers of today much more autonomy in how their careers unfold.
I’ve been part of that change, absorbing advice from the great dancers and teachers of the past but also fighting for self-determination. I’ve learnt how to make things happen, how to take a risk, how to cope when things go wrong. I was a prodigy, yet the very best period of my career came in my forties, when I was juggling being a wife and a mother as well as a ballerina. I’ve had some ghastly times too, when I felt everything I had worked for was turning to dust around me, when I was in pain, or so miserable that I just wanted to give up and try my hand at something else.
With support and belief, I managed to drive through the bad spells and keep going. I know the mental strength you need to succeed, to make your dreams come true. I’ve always understood that you are the only person responsible for your talent. You have to nurture it and believe in it.
Every person is different, but that instinct for survival and improvement is true of us all, and I did succeed, building a career that has been notable for its longevity and its variety. Though I thought I could walk away, I came to love the world of ballet so much that it has held me in its arms and pulled me back, to pass on all I have learnt to the next generation of dancers.
Edited extract from Leanne Benjamin: Built For Ballet by Leanne Benjamin with Sarah Crompton (Melbourne Books, $49.95), out October 16.
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