Built for Ballet

This autobiography by Leanne Benjamin with Sarah Crompton reveals the extraordinary life and career of one of the world's most important ballet dancers of the past fifty years.

Built for Ballet 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 offers a personal point of view on how ballet has changed and is changing. The book discusses how Benjamin helped create ballet in its modern form and now works with the dancers of today, handing on all she has known and learnt.

However, it is not just a tale of the psychology of achievement but explores how you go from being a child in small-town Rockhampton in the centre of Australia to being a power on the world stage, and how one copes with the ups and downs of that kind of career.

Famous figures such as Margot Fonteyn, Kenneth MacMillan, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Darcey Bussell, and Carlos Acosta appear in the book, along with cameo appearances by President Clinton, Michelle Obama, Diana, Princess of Wales, and David Beckham.

But it is also a book of small moments of insight—what makes a performance special, how you recover from injury, illness, and childbirth; how you combine athletic and artistic prowess with motherhood; how a different partner can alter everything; and what it is in human terms, why women get the reputation for being difficult in a world where being a good girl is too much prized. And what they can do about it.