Glen Tetley (1926-2007).

Glen Tetley had a special gift for making dances and for inspiring affection. The dances were not always kindly received by critics, but the gentle, soft-spoken man almost invariably was. Not that he was easy on dancers. Tetley was notoriously demanding. He wanted dancers to reach beyond their range. Karen Kain, who starred in his widely seen 1986 National Ballet of Canada piece, Alice, recalls Tetley's "ferocious" demand for total artistic commitment. "If you were not up to scratch, he'd let you know."

Glenford Andrew Tetley Jr., born in Cleveland but raised just outside of Pittsburgh, was a latecomer to the field, completing premedical studies during wartime naval service before committing to dance. His open-mindedness led him to ignore the conventionally hostile ballet-versus-modern divide. Tetley trained and danced in both camps--Graham, Joffrey, Tudor, Holm, among others. As a choreographer he drew on this broad movement experience, some argued promiscuously, to pioneer a melding of modern dance's visceral earthiness with the ethereal lyricism of classical ballet.

America in the 1960s was not easily persuaded, so Tetley shifted his focus across the Atlantic where companies such as Nederlands Dans Theater and Ballet Rambert embraced his ecumenical aesthetic. Tetley became the ballet modernist of choice for many venerable European companies. As the sharp edge of his modernism--including the use of unfamiliar, often electronic music--softened, his homeland became more responsive, too. American Ballet Theatre, Dance Theatre of Harlem, Pacific Northwest Ballet, and Houston Ballet have all performed his ballets (see "Dance Matters," Sept. '06). Dancers cherished what Tetley offered. David Allan, the original Dormouse in Alice, said, "Glen changed people's dancing lives. He fired up your imagination and made you look at yourself differently."