Oracle.

An intellectual giant among choreographers, Glen Tetley has set himself the personal challenge of rendering weighty abstract concepts in pure movement. In Oracle, his fourth original work set on the National Ballet of Canada, Tetley has taken on no less a theme than the universal feminine principle as embodied in the White Goddess of matriarchal mythology.

Five women and five men, representing various aspects of the Goddess and a supplicant poet-hunter, respectively, form five couples who collectively explore the shifting relationships between the universal matriarch and humankind. Utilizing his trademark ebb and flow of energy, Tetley keeps the ballet in constant motion with dense footwork and tricky partnering that is both inventive and challenging, yet moves effortlessly between pas de deux and ensemble stage pictures.

Longtime Tetley collaborators Nadine Baylis (design) and John B. Read (lighting) have created an arresting, otherworldly aura. Clothed in pristine white unitards and bathed in surreal pools of blue-white light, the dancers are set against a backdrop of ever-changing cloud formations that mirror the lush emotional shifts imbedded in the neoromantic Symphonies No. 1 and 2 of Australian composer Carl Vine.

Two couples dominate the ballet, with the other three taking on the aspects of a Greek chorus. Magnificent lead dancers Margaret Illmann and Robert Tewsley portray granite strength that is as lyrical as it is heroic. In direct contrast are the agitated, angst-filled movements of Gizella Witkowsky and Roberto Campanella, a kinetic turmoil always dispelled by the tranquillity of Illmann and Tewsley.

An artist can, perhaps, unconsciously manifest an idea beyond his original intentions. Oracle seems to me to be a sequel to Tetley's Voluntaries (1 973). The latter was created for Stuttgart Ballet in the wake of director John Cranko's untimely death and was designed to give the dancers courage for the future. In recent years, cancer has given Tetley his own brush with mortality. Where Voluntaries, with its upward movement, indicates hope, Oracle, with its earthbound decisiveness, points, perhaps, to affirmation. In Oracle, the White Goddess has become a metaphor for the joy of being alive.