28 October 2021 09:22

Leanne Benjamin guests on this week's RAD podcast

We are thrilled this week to have Leanne Benjamin as the special guest on the new RAD podcast just as her fascinating new memoir hits the shops.

Genée alumna and coach at this year's Fonteyn, Australian ballerina Leanne Benjamin is a self-declared perfectionist – difficult in ballet, where the perfect performance is a tantalising impossibility. Even so, she came closer than most. Her career took her from rural Queensland to the heights of  The Royal Ballet in London. She conquered both the great 19th- century ballets, and created challenging new work, and revelled in the complex stories of Kenneth MacMillan, who she knew and worked with. As Leanne revisits her career in a revealing new memoir, Built for Ballet (written with Sarah Crompton) she discusses her new-found love of coaching, including of young dancers in the RAD’s  Margot Fonteyn International Ballet Competition. She also reveals a truly remarkable childhood pet…

Hear what she has to say on our Why Dance Matters podcast.

Built for Ballet

Also out this week, Leanne Benjamin: Built for Ballet (written with Sarah Crompton) reveals the extraordinary life and career of one of the world’s most important ballet dancers of the past 50 years. 

The book takes you behind the scenes to find a real understanding of the pleasure and the pain, the demands and the intense commitment it requires to become a ballet dancer. 

It’s a book for ballet-lovers which will explain from Benjamin’s personal point of view, how ballet has changed and is changing. 

Read extracts from the book.

Leanne reading from her 1981 diary in which she won a gold medal at the Genée

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