Leanne Benjamin: Royal Ballet's fearless young ballerina.

Australia's versatile Leanne Benjamin has settled into a major career with Britain's Royal Ballet 

You could say that there are two ways of looking at the Royal Ballet's Australian ballerina, Leanne Benjamin. If you look at her close up, you see the wonderfully detailed articulations: the proud set of the head and the expressive angling of it, the long hands without tension, the feet touching earth just so, the roll down through the foot.

If you look at her in long shot, you see that although she stands about five feet two, she dances big: generously, fearlessly, with her long limbs, her light jumps, and high, strong extensions. Vitality and musicality underlie every move. A keen intelligence is visibly at work in Benjamin's fresh and individual interpretations, especially of sensual, bold, complex women, as well as everything from Juliet to Odette-Odile.

For an American dance observer newly located in London in 1989, while Benjamin was with London Festival Ballet (now English National Ballet), her dancing seemed almost a taste of home, with that special zest and vitality and breadth that Australians and Americans seem to share.

No wonder the twenty-nine-year-old ballerina has attracted excellent reviews in the U.S., in 1989 with Festival Ballet and last year with Royal Ballet. Most recently, her sensuous freedom in Frederick Ashton's The Dream and her confidence in The Sleeping Beauty won New York audiences.

But she gained special notice for her work in two of the late Kenneth MacMillan's sensationalist ballets that are not always popular in the U.S. Aided by her willingness to take risks, she created understandable and human characters with an underlying decency as the Madonna-Whore-Rape Victim in his The Judas Tree and as Mary Vetsera, Prince Rudolf's partner in suicide in Mayerling. In the latter, the diminutive ballerina easily held her own with six-foot-three Zoltan Solymosi, conveying emotional strength, physical fearlessness, and finally a real compassion for her demon-beset lover. Anna Kisselgoff wrote in the New York Times of the "most exciting cast," in which Benjamin "used her high extension and sculptured line to create a voluptuous image" and projected "electrifying rapport even while being flipped over her partner's shoulder."

MacMillan had, in fact, come along and renewed Benjamin's interest in dancing at a time when she was thinking of giving it up, and he was responsible for her joining Royal Ballet in 1992.

Interviewed during the Metropolitan Opera House season, Benjamin proved as striking offstage as on, with her clear skin and luxuriant hair and her refreshing directness. When a guard backstage told her brusquely to "Get out of the way so people can go through," she shot back, "A little politeness would help."

She has a well-earned reputation as both a natural talent and a hard worker. Her conversation is peppered with the word "challenge." Her need for challenges has led her from Australia to the Royal Ballet School and through several companies to the Royal Ballet. But she is glad that extended touring is behind her: For all her perfectionist drive and frank ambition to be a great artist, she is delighted to be settled enough to have a personal life as well a career; to have enough performances but not too many. "My body doesn't look fragile, but it's not the work-horse type of body," she says.

She has all the artist's usual spasms of self-doubt after a performance that doesn't meet her expectations. "It is a lot of pressure, getting out there and always wanting to be great. I always want to be great. When you don't do a wonderful performance, that's the worst thing.

"But I'm quite level-headed," she says. "I'm normal, I'm quite normal. So I'm fine." She seems to have a basic confidence that perhaps stems from her secure and happy small-town childhood with a loving and supportive family. Rockhampton, a small city in Queensland, was "the sort of place where you left the doors open at home," she remembers. "It was like your dream upbringing, really. I think it helped."

Life had its stringent requirements as well. She started dance classes at three and was onstage at four. Her principal ballet teacher, Valerie Hansen, taught her "lots of discipline," in classes at 6:30 every morning and after school as well. "I didn't think of it at the time," she shrugs. "I didn't know any different."

Asked how being Australian may have influenced her dancing, she says, "I suppose maybe being spontaneous. Maybe my open personality. I wasn't frightened. I was ready for a challenge. I've always liked challenges."

Having been consistently encouraged, she embarked for London and the Royal Ballet School at age sixteen. She proceeded to walk away with the prestigious Adeline Genee gold medal of the Royal Academy of Dancing in 1980 and to win a Prix de Lausanne the following year. Then, for the workshop performances in her last year, she danced Giselle. The school had never staged the complete ballet before. "It was such a big challenge for a student to take on," Benjamin says. "I was very nervous, but quite prepared, I think." Mary Clarke reported in Dancing Times that she showed herself "a lovely dancer" who was "no carbon copy of any Giselle I have seen."

Peter Wright, with whom Benjamin had worked on Giselle, invited her to join his Sadler's Wells (now Birmingham) Royal Ballet. She stayed there five years, becoming a principal dancer. Wright "was always great to me," she says, but she found that the repertoire as it was then didn't keep up her technical level, and she was also getting repeated injuries from dancing every night. Consequently, in 1988 she accepted Peter Schaufuss's offer to join Festival Ballet. "Peter was a hard taskmaster," she recalls. "He really improved my technique at the time. He was really, really into the technical side of everything." When he moved to Berlin's German Opera Ballet two years later, she went with him, as did a number of Festival Ballet dancers. Her repertoire included several of George Balanchine's ballets as well as the classics. On a return visit to Britain, she appeared at the Edinburgh Festival with the company and danced Giselle with spontaneity and freshness.

But Benjamin found performances in Berlin too few and Germany incompatible. It was at this time that she thought of giving up dancing, until MacMillan appeared on the scene to stage his version of the Wozzeck story, Different Drummer. "So we worked together on that. He really rejuvenated my want of dancing again. I needed a challenge, and he came along and gave it to me." MacMillan spoke with Royal Ballet's artistic director, Anthony Dowell; an invitation was forthcoming. But rather than jump at the opportunity, Benjamin took nine months off from dancing, during which she had a needed hernia operation and thought hard about dancing. She decided it was what she really wanted. "And then unfortunately Kenneth died just after I joined," she laments. "That was such a shock, such a shock. In Berlin he wasn't a well man, and we all knew it. But no one knew that he would really go that soon." When Benjamin joined the company, she worked with the choreographer on the revival of Mayerling. It was during the first performance of it that he died suddenly of a heart attack.

She likes dramatic roles and the "communication to the audience," which she feels "Kenneth was always after." She delights in finding new aspects of her characters.

Asked whether the idea of women so often being manhandled or victimized in his ballets bothers her, as in Mayerling and The Judas Tree, she demurs. "Maybe [he does it] because he thinks you can show more of your acting ability and passion in these roles. Which you can! It's always easier playing this sort of character than it is the nice, sweet girl." And does she mind being thrown around in the duets? "No, not at all. I get a little high! When you're into something like Mayerling, the character builds and the pas de deux builds. I think it works. I like sometimes taking a risk anyway. Knowing that you're there with a partner who's going to be there, you can fling yourself around."

When we talked at the Met, Benjamin was about to dance The Sleeping Beauty: "Aurora is such a big challenge. It's going to be quite difficult getting up and doing it after Mayerling and Judas Tree, because it's very hard on your body and finding your balance again. It's much easier doing the classics first and then branching out. It keeps you so centered, doing Beauty. Everything else seems easy after that."

In artistic director Dowell's production, with its vertiginous fantasy-baroque designs by Maria Bjornson, Benjamin admits that the much-commented-upon stairway down which Aurora makes her first entrance is "a bit of a head spin" and "frightening." She says, "We have no rail or anything. It's very narrow at the top as well, and you can't see [the steps because of the tutu]."

Besides Ashton's Dream, Benjamin has danced his Fille Mal Gardee at Sadler's Wells. She was looking forward to more Ashton in the current season (which marks the ninetieth anniversary of his birth), and she puts her finger on the Royal's continuing dilemma: "They really try to keep [the Ashton style]. You can see that the teachers do try, but I think it is a different training now. With Kenneth's works, often you don't need a port de bras because it's very free with the upper body. It makes it easier to use the legs, for me. And I think [port de bras is] what's difficult with the Ashton. And you also have to develop this in Sleeping Beauty."

She feels that in a way she has had to concentrate on her legs and feet because "My legs are so long, they usually take over. And my feet are so long." But she is concerned that she needs to pay more attention to port de bras. "I have very long arms and hands. It's not easy for me to make pretty positions with my arms unless they're in quite a relaxed state. So I enjoy that with the Kenneth [ballets] because I can just move them freely. But I have to really consciously think about them, doing Aurora and things like that."

Benjamin is happy to be back in London and at the Royal. Since it was very much her own decision after experiencing conditions elsewhere, she says she doesn't "feel stuck," and adds, "I really like working with Anthony [Dowell]. He's a really lovely man. I wouldn't want his job, that's for sure! It's very difficult looking after all these people. Dancers want attention. Of course they do. And he understands because he's been through it, he's had the performances where he's been very nervous, and he knows what it's like." She is happy for another reason: "I've built up quite an audience there. That's a great feeling because you know that people come to see you especially."

Goals for the future? "Developing, working on different roles, working with different choreographers and different companies, different partners," she says straightforwardly. She was planning to go to the Havana International Ballet Festival in November with a regular and valued Cuban partner in the Royal, Jose Manuel Carreno. She would like to appear back home in Australia, especially since she has only danced professionally there once, at a gala. And she is interested in more guesting. In short, more challenges.

Marilyn Hunt is a Dance Magazine senior editor.