LOCAL BALLET DANCER HEADS TO LONDON
- O&A Team
- May 25, 2021
- People
- Ben Glenny, featured, Matthew Willman, Royal School of Ballet
- 0 Comments
WORDS: SHIRLEY LE GUERN
DANCE IMAGES: MATTHEW WILLMAN
Young Durban ballet dancer, Ben Glenny, will move one step closer to realizing his dream to study at the Royal Ballet School (RBS) in London when he travels to the UK to take part in that iconic institution’s Royal Ballet School Summer Intensive in July.
“It was one of those emails you can’t believe you are reading,” says mom Laurie Glenny of the message that unexpectedly popped into her email box two weeks ago.
Mother and son had just finished a picnic lunch in a nearby park and were on their way back to a dancing class. Parents, Laurie and Reuben, had applied to the RBS in February and Ben had been placed on a waiting list in March. Last year’s Summer Intensive had been put on hold due to Covid and this year’s applicants had to either retract their applications or be happy to wait for a place to become vacant, even if it was at the last minute.
The RBS’s Summer Intensives enable young dancers from across the world to experience the highest levels of coaching from the school’s full-time staff and international teachers. They not only benefit from extremely intensive dance training, but discover if they are eligible to study at the school full time.
The big challenge now is for Laurie, who will be accompanying her 15-year-old son, to navigate Covid travel restrictions and quarantines to get her courageous youngster to the RBS.
A CHILDHOOD DREAM
“My dream is to join the RBS and ultimately make a significant contribution to the world around me by using the gift that God has given me,” says the confidently ambitious teen who admits that he feels most alive when he is dancing.
“Ever since I can remember, I have always wanted to do this thing called dance and it has always been a passion of mine. When I was about two years old, I would go with my mom to fetch my brother who was at pre-primary school.
On one particular day, we were running very late and had arrived about 15 minutes after we were supposed to. My brother was in his classroom waiting for us to fetch him. Usually, there was a ballet class at the school hall. When we arrived, I saw all these girls dressed up as little ballet dancers and I was astonished to find that there actually was a real world out there of ballet and dancing,” he recalls.
Laurie fills in the gaps. Just before that, Ben had visited his grandmother who had put on a video of Michael Flatley’s Lord of the Dance to entertain him. The ordinarily fidgety tiny tot had watched the production from beginning to end.
Discovering the tiny ballerinas simply proved that the world of dance was real. He never stopped asking questions.
By the time elder brother, Ethan, went to school, Laurie asked if the local ballet teacher would take on her 2 ½ year-old. She asked her to wait until Ben was three.
The Christmas after Ben’s third birthday, the Glenny’s bought him his first pair of ballet shoes.
In his room upstairs, which is much like that of any teen except for a large mirror and a dream board with a collection of ballet pictures, including those of Australian Steven McRae, a principal dancer with the RBS and Ben’s role model, is a towel rail. Ben remembers clinging on to it as a makeshift barre to practice and show his parents his latest steps.
“Steven McRae’s story is about a genuine guy who loved to dance,” Ben explains.
McRae grew up in Sydney as the son of a drag racer. He started dancing at the age of seven and studied both tap and ballet throughout high school until, as a teen, he realised that he wanted to make dance a career. After winning a number of international competitions, including the Prix de Lausanne in Switzerland, he earned a scholarship to study at the RBS in London, becoming a principal dancer in 2009.
Ben’s story is not that different.
“What has been amazing is that this (love for ballet) never came from us,” Laurie says.
A DIFFICULT JOURNEY
For much of his school career – except two short gaps when he hung up his ballet shoes to try a host of school sports – Ben has had to endure a great deal of teasing from fellow pupils. Although he did well at the likes of hockey, cricket, rugby, swimming and gymnastics, he missed dancing and it is only when he was able to take classes with a private teacher and didn’t have to change into ballet clothes at school to attend classes that the stress of teasing subsided.
Ben explains that, as a very small child, he didn’t really worry about what others said. But, as he grew older, there was a “middle point” where he did notice what his peers thought.
“I would often try and keep it a secret. I was hiding from everyone because I felt that if everyone knew that I did ballet, they would label me. I was never in a class where there was another boy. It was very hard. There were a lot of difficult moments, especially with the teasing. My Mom would always tell me that they didn’t know that ballet is not for girls only. The only thing that got me through that was my love for ballet,” he admits.
He continues: “I think I had to go through that because I had to develop as a person. Now, I’m so much stronger and secure in myself. I’m not doing this to please others or to fit into anything. I’m doing it because of my passion for it.”
Another key factor has been the support of his family.
“I’m extremely lucky and grateful to have their support because I know of a lot of stories about amazing dancers who could have made a career but didn’t have anyone backing them. I think that, when you are so vulnerable at a young age and you have this dream that you’ve discovered, you need that. It is quite sad to think that that little kids who want to dance, especially young boys, are being told that they can’t because it is not something that boys should be doing in South Africa.”
The respect of his elder brother Ethan, who he fondly describes as “a social butterfly” who enjoys sports, is musical and enjoys fashion and design, is also very important to him.
“He’s been a good influence because he’s been able to give me advice. He’s always helped me through the struggles of teasing and bullying. He understood. If he knew what was going on, he would stand up for me as well,” Ben recalls.
WATERSHED MOMENTS
For Laurie, a watershed moment came when reading photographer Matthew Willman’s autobiography Tripping Over Presidents. In addition to speaking about his photographic work, Willman also speaks about his own career as a dancer and about a photographic visit to the RBS.
“He tells how he gets taken down a passage way and the principal of the school opens the door to a particular class of which they are particularly proud. The door swings open and there are 18 male dancers – and entire class of male dancers! In the book, he says how astonished he is. In 20 years growing up in South Africa, he never met another boy dancing. He explains how it is an incredibly isolating experience and how he also kept it quiet that he was a dancer,” she recounts.
She says that, for the first time, she felt that she had encountered someone who understood Ben’s journey. “I read this chapter and cried because I realised that there is a world out there that we haven’t been exposed to. We are so culturally poor,” she says of South Africa.
In contrast, children growing up in big cities like New York or London know about ballet and symphonies, she points out.
After finishing the book, Laurie couldn’t forget that one particular chapter and discussed it with a friend who encouraged her to contact Willman.
Eventually, she plucked up the courage and emailed him, thanking him for writing the book and telling him how Ben had danced since the age of three. “I said, if you were to give us any word of encouragement what would you say? He wrote back asking when he could phone me.”
In September last year, during a visit to the Glenny family, Willman admitted that as a talented dancer, Ben probably had no future in South Africa. He also suggested that, if Ben wished to look further afield to the likes of the RBS, he would have to radically change his training schedule. It was one thing to win gold at local festivals but a far more stringent routine was needed for him to perform internationally.
Willman also gave the family insight into the so-called ballet industry overseas, explaining potential career options.
“That was when I realised that the RBS was where I wanted to go and that’s where I am aiming at,” Ben chips in.
Willman, who has photographed portraits of statesmen like Mandela and Barrack Obama, captured controversial political figures, landscapes and the performing arts, ultimately went on to help Ben create the photographic portfolio of different alignments which had to accompany his application to the RBS.
ABOUT TURNS
At the time, Ben was in Grade 8 at Kearsney College and having to deal with online schooling at home because of the Covid lockdown. He was battling to juggle his academic work with school sports and dancing and decided to approach his parents to discuss home schooling.
“I knew that there was this option and that it would provide me with more time for my dancing and training. I had decided that this was what I wanted to do professionally and that this period, while still in South Africa, was an opportunity to train as hard as I could to get to the level of dancing overseas. Basically, the only real way to do that was to free up the time and to actually be able to do morning classes and not just go dancing in the afternoons. Even though it was quite hard to let go of that environment and my friends at Kearsney, it has definitely helped me to progress so much further than I would have done if I was still at normal school,” he explains.
Laurie had to shrug off the stigma attached to home schooling and realise that, if her son was to study at the RBS, the sooner he switched to the British schooling system, the better. He is currently completing his O levels.
“On a typical day, I’ll wake up and then I’ll stretch and do all my exercises to prepare my body for the day. Then I’ll either have a morning ballet class in Durban or a private one. During the middle of the day, I have online classes and, in the afternoons, I’ll go for afternoon classes down in Pinetown – a variety of ballet, tap or modern.”
Saturday mornings, too, mean ballet classes and add up to a week of approximately 18 hours of dancing.
Being highly disciplined is essential if you have set yourself a significant goal, says this unexpectedly wise young man.
“Obviously I have set my goals very high by wanting to go to one of the top ballet schools in the world. With that sense of direction, you aren’t just mindlessly going through the motions. You are actually striving for something and working every day to get closer to that dream.”
But even that can go too far and Ben found himself facing burnout towards the beginning of this year. It was time to step back and re-evaluate.
“It has definitely been a journey in terms of finding balance, no puns intended. Even last year, adjusting to being at home so much was not easy. You have to find the balance in your life because, if you don’t, it can become depressing. What has helped me is that my dancing motivates me to do my school work and my school work motivates me to do dancing.”
Even now, he can’t quite believe he’s heading to the RBS in July.
“The objective is to gain experience there and absorb everything that I can learn, to grow as a dancer and become better. It is a stepping stone towards a career in ballet – and all the previous sacrifices have been stepping stones to this point,” he concludes.
