This candid memoir opens a fascinating window on the emotive journey of a ballet mum, the mother of Yasmine Naghdi, Principal ballerina of The Royal Ballet. She presents a unique perspective on the many trials and tribulations she has lived through: from her initial hesitations to all her concerns once Yasmine commenced her classical ballet training at The Royal Ballet School, and up until she joined The Royal Ballet as a young professional dancer.
"Tears of a Ballet Mum" offers a fascinating insight into what it takes to support a talented child through the physical and mental demands of ballet training, how to aid in building mental strength, and how to take ownership of the training whilst ensuring overall mental well-being. With over 70 private, backstage and performance colour photos.
This autobiography by Leanne Benjamin with Sarah Crompton reveals the extraordinary life and career of one of the worlds most important ballet dancers of the past fifty 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 is a book for ballet-lovers which will explain from Benjamins personal point of view, how ballet has changed and is changing. It is a book of history: she was first taught by the people who created ballet in its modern form and now she works with the dancers of today, handing on all she has known and learnt. But it is also a book for people who are just interested in the psychology of achievement, how you go from being a child in small-town Rockhampton in the centre of Australia to being a power on the worlds biggest stages -- and how an individual copes with the ups and downs of that kind of career.
It is a story full of big names and big personalities -- Margot Fonteyn, Kenneth MacMillan, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Darcey Bussell, Carlos Acosta to name a few. President Clinton, Michelle Obama, Diana Princess of Wales and David Beckham all make an appearance. 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, what it is like to fall over in front of thousands of people and what it is like to triumph.
Above all, it seeks to explain, in warm and 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.
Margot Fonteyn - born plain Peggy Hookham - was dreamed into existence by the architects of British ballet: Ninette de Valois, Frederick Ashton and Constant Lambert.
Carried to fame on a wave of wartime patriotism, Margot's sense of duty rather than ambition propelled her forward. Yet her gifts were such that her pre-eminence would come to eclipse the careers of subsequent generations.
Ballet is a fairytale world; if Margot, like the pure and poetic heroine of Swan Lake, was a natural Odette, she would also have to contend with virtue's raw shadow-side in the guise of Constant Lambert, Roberto Arias and Rudolph Nureyev - the men who, like Von Rothbart, were to take possession of her heart.
Monica Mason, Darcey Bussell and Leanne Benjamin talk about the legacy of Margot Fonteyn.
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