The Difficult Ballerina: Leanne Benjamin’s Autobiography

Built for Ballet,

An Autobigraphy by Leanne Benjamin,with Sarah Crompton

Melbourne Books, 2021. Now available as an e-book.

I.

When the ballerina Leanne Benjamin had been dancing twenty years, the Royal Ballet, appointed a woman, Monica Mason, as its new director. The Royal Ballet was the fourth company with which Benjamin had danced - she had reached principal level in all of them - but it now had a number of younger star ballerinas, most of whom never ruffled feathers. Benjamin, by contrast, was thirty-eight years old; she had acquired a reputation for being outspoken, difficult, demanding.

That’s not all. Benjamin almost immediately announced to Mason that she had just found she was pregnant - and that she wanted to stop work immediately. Any of us with any knowledge of ballet companies can imagine any new director reacting by encouraging this troublesome artist to move on into retirement.

What happened instead? Benjamin gave birth successfully to her baby. She then entered into what she and audiences came to recognize was the most glorious part of her career. As she knows, this was because she and Mason were in accord. She was mature, resourceful, confident, versatile. When she returned to the stage, it was in the Royal’s premiere of Christopher Wheeldon’s Polyphonia. What’s more, she was already rehearsing the world premiere of Wayne McGregor’s first creation for the Covent Garden stage, Qualia. She danced Juliet, Cinderella, Giselle, Mary Vetsera in Mayerling, Anastasia, before celebrating her fortieth birthday by dancing Frederick Ashton’s Voices of Spring at the Metropolitan Opera House, New York. In her forties, she created roles for McGregor, David Bintley, Kim Brandstrup, Adam Hougland, Alistair Marriott, Christopher Wheeldon, made her debuts in Nijinska’s Les Biches (the Garçonne), Balanchine’s Emeralds (Jewels), Stravinsky Violin Concerto, Ashton’s Rhapsody, Robbins’s Dances at a Gathering, Michzel Corder’s L’Invitation au voyage ; and she danced Odette-Odile, Fokine’s Firebird, MacMillan’s Song of the Earth, Manon, Mayerling, and Different Drummer. Even to those of us who had spotted Benjamin’s great talent in her teens, her forties were the zenith of her career; she always expressed her gratitude to Mason. There are larger lessons to be learnt here.

II.

Benjamin had an entirely unusual career. A plain-speaking Australian who finished her training in London, she reached principal status with Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet only to leave it, at age twenty-four, for English National Ballet, in 1988. Having danced as a principal there - she danced Juliet in Frederick Ashton’s Romeo and Juliet at New York Metropolitan Opera House in 1989 - she then left that, at age twenty-five, for Berlin’s Deutsche Oper Ballett. Having danced there for almost three years, she left it in 1992, joining the Royal Ballet at Covent Garden at age twenty-eight, only at soloist status but with justified hopes of promotion: in 1993 she was made principal of what has long been regarded as one of the world’s foremost classical-ballet companies. In 1997, aged thirty-two, she danced the title role of Ashton’s three-act Cinderella on the Royal’s opening night at the Metropolitan Opera House.

“Dancers are often asked to name the highlight of their career, but the question is essentially impossible to answer. I couldn’t tell you that, any more than I could tell you my favourite ballet. There are so many moments, so many ballets. But it is true to say that in January 1997 I felt on top of the world. I danced the opening night of the Royal Ballet’s Cinderella at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York and it was as if I had arrived at something special. I was on one of my favourite stages, a place that forms a perfect bond between the audience and the performer. Quite often in my life, when I arrive in a theatre, rather than try and squeeze in an extra bit of rehearsal, I will simply walk out onto the stage, and see how it feels with the lights up, thinking about where I need to look to establish communication with the people who will be sitting out there in the dark. The Met was a place I always felt at home. That night I know I dazzled.”

Along the way, however, Benjamin has often challenged her male directors. She was still early in her career at Sadler’s Wells Royal when its longterm director, Peter Wright told her “You can’t have your cake and eat it.” She replied “Why?” As she remarks in Built for Ballet, her 2021 autobiography, that more or less summed up their relationship.

“He wanted me to be his next ballerina, to be the successor to people like Margaret Barbieri and Marion Tat, but he also wanted me to mould me in their image. I didn’t want to be shaped in that way… My ability was different from these dancers with a delicate style and a beautiful line. I was more athletic, could raise my leg higher, wanted to make roles seem more contemporary, perhaps less safe. I felt I was being forced to copy someone else, which is not the best option for a younger dancer, who should never feel she has to be a carbon copy of someone else. I was only twenty, and probably very naïve, but I pushed back against it the idea with all my might. Perhaps I was wrong, but it didn’t feel that way.”

Such passages add a terrific element of grit to Benjamin’s memoir. Here’s another:

“I’ve been asked whether my reputation for being demanding arose because ballet is patriarchal. I’ve had five male directors and one female director in my career, and the stagers and coaches I have worked for have been fairly equally divided between the sexes; my sense is that the power balance in ballet is less unequal than many other professions. Historically, dance is full of powerful women, from Ninette de Valois and Marie Rambert, who between them laid the foundations for ballet in Britain, to Lucia Chase, co-founder of American Ballet Theatre, and Peggy van Praagh, founding artistic director of Australian Ballet. More recently, Monica Mason at the Royal, Karen Kain in Canada and my old friend Tamara Rojo at English National Ballet have been successful directors of companies. I’ve worked with so many strong women coaches, including Patricia Neary, Maina Gielgud and Loipa Araujo, one of my favourite teachers ever.

“As far as I was concerned, I didn’t care whether I was working with a man or with a woman, as long as they were the best person for the job. It’s perhaps more relevant to ask whether I would have been regarded as argumentative if I had been a man behaving in the same way. There the answer must be no. I am direct and forceful in how I speak; my mind works fast and I am not afraid to express an opinion. I have often seen men throw their weight and their views around and they are often indulged rather than branded as difficult.

“Opinionated women need space to speak out if ballet is to grow and thrive as an art form. I don’t think the problems I encountered in my early years would happen in the Royal or most other companies today, and I have noticed that coaches and teachers are now very conscious of listening to what their charges have to say and allowing them to have opinions of their own.”

Benjamin is proud of her origins in Queensland, Australia, often returning there. That outspoken nature of hers is often seen as an Australian characteristic: she shows its virtues.

Still, she’s also self-critical. She describes several occasions when she’s fallen over onstage. She knows she has sometimes gone on fussing over details of steps when she should have focused on larger matters in a role; she leaves us in no doubt about how maddeningly long she has often lingered in her dressing-room or in the wings. She had had injuries; she’s frank about them.

Above all, she makes no bones about the situations leading up to her decisions to move on. Once she told Peter Wright of her decision to leave Sadler’s Wells Royal after six years, he and his deputy, Desmond Kelly, stopped coming to her remaining performances: a decision that sounds to me more odious than Benjamin claims. Eventually, in 2013, Wright wrote to congratulate her on her career:

“You are a true ballerina and artist. Your career has been remarkable, and I do admire the way in which you found your place at the top.”

Well, it only took him twenty-five years to get around to saying so. In the intervening period, however, his displeasure was allowed to register on her. Benjamin stresses “I can’t emphasise how rare it was for a principal dancer to leave her home company at that time, and my own bravery astonishes me. I had weighed up the options, decided what I needed to do and acted.”

III.

What’s a ballerina? As I’ve written before, you have not experienced the full inanity of balletomania in its full grandiosity until you’ve heard some putative authority announce that this or that interpreter of principal roles is “not a ballerina”. But by any other definition, Benjamin surely qualifies.

While she was still a sixteen-year-old Australian student new to the Royal Ballet School, she won the Adeline Genee Competition Gold Medal in early 1981. I attended that Sadler’s Wells performance: it was the fiftieth anniversary of the competition: the judges who gave her the Gold Medal included Phyllis Bedells, Margot Fonteyn, Pamela May, and David Wall. Bedells, the veteran pioneering ballerina of London’s music-hall days, was – like Ninette de Valois – in no need of any microphone when she projected her words to the audience. She announced that the distance between Benjamin and the next best dancer was so great that the judges had decided to give no silver medal that year. Benjamin was not just a skilful technician: she was a theatrically legible artist (tiny – scarcely over five feet tall - but with huge eyes, long limbs, and long, strong, subtly arching feet) who found time to shape her phrases with individuality. The Daily Telegraph review bore the headline: “A Star is Born”. Benjamin went on to become one of the two winners of the Prix de Lausanne that year.

In 1982, a little before her eighteenth birthday, she danced Giselle in the Royal Ballet School’s annual performance, coached by Alicia Markova (1910-2004) and Peter Wright (b.1926). In 1985, when she was a twenty-year-old soloist with Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet, Peter Schaufuss, the new director of London Festival Ballet (today’s English National Ballet), singled her out to play Juliet in a major revival of Frederick Ashton’s Romeo and Juliet (1955) for London Festival Ballet (today’s English National Ballet). She rehearsed the role in 1985 with the eighty-year-old Ashton over successive evenings - although, for sensible career reasons (she and Schaufuss were in different British companies), she ended up not dancing it until 1988. In due course, she also worked with Kenneth MacMillan, who, in 1991, revised his Different Drummer (1984) with her as Marie, a year before his death, and then created a pas de deux for her and Stephen Jefferies.

As Benjamin knows, she was lucky: Ashton died in 1988, MacMillan in 1992. Her times with Ashton and MacMillan, though all too brief, are among the glowing embers at the grateful heart of Built for Ballet. When she made her final move to the Covent Garden company, she did so with MacMillan’s encouragement. She remained with that company twenty-one years until her retirement in 2013, around the time of her forty-ninth birthday. All this is splendid; and Benjamin knows her good fortune.

During her career, she was coached in leading roles by Suzanne Farrell, Natalia Makarova, Monica Mason, Georgina Parkinson (her mother-in-law), Galina Samsova, Lynn Seymour, Antoinette Sibley. She also created roles for Michael Corder, Derek Deane, Jennifer Jackson, as well as the already named Bintley, Brandstrup, Marriott, McGregor, Ratmansky, Wheeldon.

Her voice as a writer is unaffected, direct, thoughtful, prosaic, devoid of poetry or rhetoric. This at several times gives the book a plodding tone, especially as she is basing it closely on letters and diaries she wrote throughout her career. On visiting Scotland in 1987, she writes “’Gosh it’s gorgeous here,’ I reported back home. ‘No wonder the Scots are so proud of their country.” That’s nice to hear for those of us who also love Scotland, but it takes us nowhere: Benjamin doesn’t pause to tell us which of Scotland’s beauties she saw. (Compare this to the passage in Fonteyn’s Autobiography where she describes - lyrically - her first holiday in the Greek Mediterranean.)

Benjamin is more interesting when she takes us through her experiences as an artist -and intensely practical. In Swan Lake, she’s an Odette-Odile who finds Odile more enjoyable, Odette more tiring. Because she’s spent time in the corps de ballet, she objects to Odettes who slow the tempi for the solo variation; the corps, having to stand still, suffer more that way. In Mayerling - she knows that Mary Vetsera has been one of her defining roles - she takes us through each of her character’s scenes, analysing the choices available to the interpreter and her own decisions.

Benjamin can be seen on screen in a wide range of repertory on DVD and YouTube, from Marius Petipa’s Coppélia to Ashton’s Voices of Spring, from Ashton’s Swan Lake pas de quatre divertissement (a superb account, from her English National Ballet days) to Fokine’s The Firebird. (You can even see her looking for the first time, decades later, at footage of her 1980 performance at the Prix de Lausanne.)

It’s customary to say that all Royal Ballet interpreters of the Firebird since 1980 have learnt the role from Monica Mason, who in turn studied it in 1978 with Margot Fonteyn, who in turn was coached in it in 1954 by its 1910 originator, Tamara Karsavina. That’s a marvellous example of ballet lineage, but what matters more is that Benjamin was the best interpreter since Mason. (I think I really may have seen all the many other Royal interpreters since 1978; the Maryinsky version, though I’ve seen a few of its casts, doesn’t count, since that company has trashed their production by dancing it like harmless tourist folklore, whereas the Royal makes it gripping narrative and fascinatingly modernist choreography.) Benjamin had the role’s danger, its elemental power, its decisiveness. Fokine’s ballet can seem quaint, which is how the Maryinsky wants it. Benjamin and the Royal make it modern, important.

If there is one Benjamin role I’d like to see again on video now, it’s the Aria II ballerina in Balanchine’s Stravinsky Violin Concerto. Created by Kay Mazzo in 1972, this role is usually an anomaly among Balanchine’s portraits of women: whereas so many of his women are independent, elusive, empowered, this one usually seems a poignant study in marital passive aggression, repeatedly summoning her male partner back to her by showing how her knees are buckling inward when he’s not by her side. Benjamin, however, made this woman assertive, vital, decisive. Although I’m fairly sure this is the opposite of what Balanchine intended, I can’t help thinking he’d have been impressed, amused, even grateful.

IV.

Today, Benjamin is active in London and Australia, coaching at the Royal Ballet, working on committees. She ends with the words of her 2020 address to the graduating students of the Royal Ballet School. This has seven headings: “1: Surround yourself with support.” “2: Compete with yourself, not others.” “3: Don’t be put off if things don’t go your way.” “4: You learn more from criticism than you do from praise.” “5: Be consistent and reliable.” “6: Treat people you work with respectfully and expect nothing less in return.” “7: Remember your passion.”

Her book shows that she has lived these policies. I have only one cavil: when it comes to 4, Benjamin not only reads her reviews, she likes to quote them, throughout the book. A dancer who quotes her critics – a wide selection of them - and with admiration? Doesn’t she know this will only encourage them?

This deplorable weakness apart, Benjamin is wonderfully sane throughout Built for Ballet. Reading it, I wonder if she’ll be applying for any of the top jobs now opening up in ballet. I hope so. This is a ballerina who means to make a difference.

@Alastair Macaulay, 2022