Leanne Benjamin arrived in London in 1980, aged sixteen, to attend the Royal Ballet School, and became a principal dancer with Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet (SWRB) at twenty-three. Her career in dance has been exceptional but there is nothing complacent about this memoir, co-authored with writer and broadcaster Sarah Crompton. Benjamin is as disarmingly open about her failures as she is about her successes, whether they relate to her dancing, her decisions, or her behaviour. Punctuality (or rather her lack of it) was a continual challenge: she missed the opportunity to be promoted to soloist by arriving late on stage during a performance of Les Patineurs; on tour in India, she took a sightseeing trip and arrived at the theatre too late to step in and replace an injured principal dancer. On the other hand Benjamin candidly does not regret a ‘silly’ decision to rehearse Romeo and Juliet with Peter Schaufuss in secret, behind the back of her director Peter Wright at SWRB, because it gave her a unique opportunity to work with Frederick Ashton.
(more…)October 10, 2022
Leanne Benjamin: built for ballet, an autobiography, Leanne Benjamin with Sarah Crompton – Maggie Watson reviews
Posted by susiecrow under reviews, Uncategorized | Tags: dance autobiography, Frederick Ashton, Leanne Benjamin, Leanne Benjamin built for ballet an autobiography, Maggie Watson, Peter Schaufuss, Peter Wright, Royal Ballet, Royal Ballet School, Sadler's Wells Royal Ballet, Sarah Crompton |Leave a Comment
January 14, 2019
In Conversation: Edward Watson and Rick Guest with Sarah Crompton, National Portrait Gallery, London 11th January 2019 – Maggie Watson reviews
Posted by susiecrow under reviews | Tags: Arlene Phillips, ballet photography, Edward Watson, Friday Lates, In Conversation, Leanne Benjamin, Maggie Watson, Monica Mason, National Portrait Gallery, portraiture, Rick Guest, Sarah Crompton, Wayne McGregor |1 Comment
Rick Guest’s stunningly beautiful photographs of Edward Watson vividly illustrate the impact on twenty-first century dance aesthetics of our renewed interest in the male body. On Friday night, in a conversation expertly chaired by dance critic Sarah Crompton as part of the National Portrait Gallery’s Friday Lates talks series, Guest described how he first came to photograph Watson as the result of a commission for The Economist’s Intelligent Life magazine. He was initially taken aback by how slight Watson seemed in rather flat light, then a sudden shaft illuminated Watson’s face, giving him the photograph he needed, and Watson the impetus to project his personality in response to the camera. (more…)
December 31, 2015
What Lies Beneath: photographs by Rick Guest, book & exhibition January 2016
Posted by susiecrow under What's happening | Tags: Alban Lendorf, dance photography, Edward Watson, exhibition, Federico Bonelli, Hikaru Kobayashi, Hospital Club Gallery, Nehemiah Kish, Olivia Cowley, Rick Guest, Sarah Crompton, Sarah Lamb, Sergei Polunin, Steven McRae, Tamara Rojo, What Lies Beneath, Yuhui Choe, Zenaida Yanowsky |Leave a Comment
Photographer Rick Guest‘s latest publication What Lies Beneath accompanies the exhibition of the same name to be held at the Hospital Club Gallery in January 2016. Featuring an incredible range of companies such as The Royal Ballet, The English National Ballet, The Richard Alston Dance Company, The Dresden Semperoper, The Royal Danish Ballet and Wayne McGregor Random Dance, it includes images of dancers such as Alban Lendorf, Tamara Rojo, Sergei Polunin, Sarah Lamb, Steven McRae, Zenaida Yanowsky, Edward Watson, Olivia Cowley, Nehemiah Kish, Hikaru Kobayashi, Federico Bonelli, and Yuhui Choe. With a foreword by Tamara Rojo, Director and Lead Principal of the English National Ballet and an incisive essay by Sarah Crompton, this book is in a limited first run of 1000 copies, exquisitely printed by PUSH Print, and is in a large format, 300mm x 370mm.
Rick Guest writes:
“I wanted to make a series of portraits of the dancers themselves, as opposed to dancers dancing, to show the character that underpins their performance, to see the determination and sacrifice that it takes to succeed at such a high level. In an art form that deliberately conceals the enormity of effort that goes into its creation, we are not meant to see behind the curtain, but I think that this does a great disservice to the dancers, and that having a sense of what lies beneath both enhances our experience of the performance and leads to a more profound appreciation of the dancer’s essential being. These portraits are at once beautiful and brutal.”
What Lies Beneath is available from 15th December 2105 from rg-books.com
Further work can be viewed at rg-dance.com
Check out information about Rick Guest’s previous book of photographs The Language of the Soul here
Exhibition What Lies Beneath
Dates: 22nd-31st January 2016
Venue: The Hospital Club Gallery, 24 Endell Street, London WC2H 9HQ