ABSTRACT
Glen Tetley is an enigma. His success is as natural to some as it is controversial or even outrageous to others. His work produces annoyance and tedium in a surprisingly wide range of critics in North America, where he is repeatedly charged with pointlessness and gratuitous sensuality. Here, for instance, is Graham Jackson writing in 1994 on one of Tetley’s recent works: ‘Oracle features five men and five women copulating in that ferociously aggressive ballet-moderne manner …[it] is soft core show-and-tell which uses the magnificent bodies of the National’s dancers…as a tease’.1 Nor does this represent a new criticism or even a new phase; compare Arlene Croce writing in 1978 on Tetley’s famous Voluntaries (of 1973):
I guess people think Tetley makes dancers look sexy. Dancers in his ballets…always seem to be writhing and stretching in a steam bath…[but] there’s never any meaning in his sequences; the continuity seems designed to keep dancers narcissistically happy… Voluntaries is his tribute to John Cranko…let Heaven defend Cranko from his friends.2
