GLEN TETLEY CREATES WORLD PREMIERE FOR HOUSTON BALLET.

HOUSTON, Texas--Choreographer Glen Tetley is clearly a man who embraces opposites. Perhaps that's because his first dances were made in the 1960s, that frenetic dance history moment when ballet was booming--thanks to a flood of Russian emigres--and the great modern choreographers were producing work that would revolutionize choreography for decades to come. Tetley took his inspiration from both sides of the divide: he danced major roles with American Ballet Theatre and with Martha Graham's company, among others. Those disparate influences would shape his unusual and always challenging choreography.

Now, at age 73, Tetley has a body of work that is danced by companies such as American Ballet Theatre, Australian Ballet, Ballet Rambert, English National Ballet, Houston Ballet, National Ballet of Canada, the Norwegian National Ballet, the Royal Ballet, the Royal Danish Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, and Stuttgart Ballet, where he was artistic director for two years. In May of this year, Tetley created a work (his first for an American company in eight years) for Houston Ballet, set to avant-garde composer Sofia Gubaidulina's Introitus (Latin for a text or hymn which begins the liturgical Mass). The Texas company has three other Tetley ballets in their repertory: Praeludium (1978), Daphnis and Chloe (1975), and Rite of Spring (1974).

Houston has been waiting for the Tetley premiere with great anticipation. When principal dancer Carlos Acosta danced the role of the Chosen One in Houston Ballet's 1997 production of Rite of Spring, audience members went wild, stomping their feet and screaming for Acosta to return for curtain calls. It wasn't the riot of Nijinsky's original, but it was enough to cement a permanent place for Tetley's choreography in the company. Artistic director Ben Stevenson has been in hot pursuit of a Tetley premiere ever since and has employed his characteristic sense of humor in the quest. "Ben would send me Christmas cards with an application to do maid's work in return for a world premiere," Tetley says, chuckling.

Although Rite of Spring is characterized by its primal sexuality, strenuous movement, and heavy ritual, most Tetley ballets are marked by a search for identity rather than by narrative and character. "One of my biggest influences was Martha Graham," says the choreographer. "Her theater, her deep sensuality, her journey into the psyche--her works have nothing of the canvas about them; they have everything to do with sculpture, with three dimensional space." Graham's influence is evident in terms of staging and props, as well: Tetley used fabric and other sculpting materials in a distinctly Graham-like way to announce characters and to create mood in his 1979 full-length ballet, The Tempest.

Those elements, or Tetley's use of them, made a handful of powerful American critics cringe in the early years of his career. New Yorker critic Arlene Croce once quipped that "there are few ballets I would rather avoid than those of Glen Tetley," but the European critics, particularly the English, were kinder. The jabs didn't bother Tetley, who has spent the greater part of his thirty-seven-year career as a freelance choreographer hopping between two continents and creating ballets commission by commission--often being invited to stage works on American companies after a ballet went particularly well in Europe or Canada. The result of making ballets on dancers all over the globe is an eclectic body of work that ranges from the solemn, sweeping Voluntaries (1973), a piece made to memorialize John Cranko's death, to Alice (1986), an avant-garde ballet loosely based on the title character in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland.

Along with a contemporary sense of gravity and full-body contact, Tetley's work is often marked by its ambitious, classical ballet-style partnering. "I was lucky enough to perform at a great ballet company, American Ballet Theatre, with great ballerinas, and that went into my knowledge as a choreographer," Tetley says. "I learned about movement through space, about difficult movement, difficult partnering, and knowing what it is to do the extraordinarily difficult feats that one does in classical partnering." It makes sense, then, that many of his ballets have been made with particular dancers in mind--Voluntaries was created on Stuttgart's Marcia Haydee and Richard Cragun, while Gemini was created for the Australian Ballet's Marilyn Rowe, Carolyn Rappel, Gary Norman, and John Meehan.

For his new ballet, untitled at press time, Tetley has his eye on Houston's fiery ballerina, Lauren Anderson. "I think she has prodigious technical quality, and there are areas in her that I would like to touch, to push her," Tetley says. Given Gubaidulina's score--which Tetley describes as sparse, but spiritual and kinetic--it's likely that the ballet will be something of an enigma. That quality, along with his commitment to the marriage of contemporary and classical dance, will likely stand out as Tetley's legacy.