Moncton almost became a "Yulia, pack your bags!"
town. Dobrovolskiy was a very successful teacher at the Academy of Classical Ballet, but he wanted more. He did push, with Chalmers-Gauvin's help, to choreograph a major piece. Circle of Life, set to Vivaldi's Four Seasons, was a portrait of a woman, beginning with the youngest students and then moving up in age to the mature Shevchenco for the finale. When Dobrovolskiy wanted the school's owner to capitalize on the ballet's success by creating more new works, she balked. It was time to move on.

Chalmers-Gauvin was one of many who had been
profoundly moved by Circle of Life and was very

Acclaimed director/playwright Sharon Pollock acted as dramaturge on The Phantom of the Opera. From her critical viewpoint, Dobrovolskiy is revitalizing the art of ballet by making it less intimidating. She also has high praise for the company's focus on creation. "Everywhere I go in this country," she says, "the artists are always talking about funding. At this company, they talk about the art."

As Dobrovolskiy himself says, "We don't want to
be a big size, just a big name." <end>

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Just two days after Houston Ballet gave its company premiere of Glen Tetley's Voluntaries, on September 7, I found myself not far from Houston's Wortham Theater Centre at the spacious Cy Twombly Gallery. And it was there that I
discovered the most apt description of Tetley's bewildering and emphatic 1973 classic ballet: "In his despair, he drew the colours from his own heart."

The quotation comes from Italian lyric poet Giacomo Leopardi. In 1985, Twombly incorporated it into an installation of large canvases gathered under the rubric "Untitled (Analysis of the Rose as Sentimental Despair)." Sometimes strange coincidences pop up while one is investigating artistic expression, auspicious ones.

I don't imagine that Tetley and Twombly are closely familiar with each other's work, but it was striking that these paintings and Tetley's choreography, both stunning examples of clean expressivity, were such obviously parallel pursuits. Both works seemed to raise the question, "How does one acknowledge the seriousness of death without becoming maudlin?" A few days before the premiere, which launched Houston Ballet's 37th season and celebrated the occasion of Tetley's 80th birthday (which is being celebrated worldwide, though only by Houston Ballet in America), Tetley described the solemn origins of one of his most famous and popular works. He said he had never had a really long relationship with the South African choreographer John Cranko, who was serving as artistic director of Stuttgart Ballet when the two became acquainted. Tetley had been working with Nederlands Dans Theater in the early 1970s, and that company had been touring Germany. One night, after an all-Tetley programme in Munich, Cranko went backstage and approached the American choreographer.

"John was fascinated with my Pierrot Lunaire," says Tetley, "and he came back to successive performances of it. We went out and had some drinks, and there was this immediate bond between us. I loved his sense of humour and his total
dedication to what he was doing." As their friendship grew, Tetley became impressed with the dancing and choreography he had seen at Stuttgart Ballet. The German critics, however, weren't as enthusiastic. Tetley explains, "because he was doing mostly full-length story ballets, he invited me to make some contemporary work for the company in order to get the critics off his back."

He told Cranko that he would love to work with the ensemble, but that he needed a little time. Meanwhile, Cranko took Stuttgart Ballet on a tour of the United States. And the "little time" that Tetley had hoped for did not materialise. "On the way back from the United States," says Tetley, "John died on the flight. He died with the company members around him, everyone. [Prima ballerina] Marcia Haydée called me and said, 'We need you more than ever, could you come and create work for the company and be here with us?'" To that Tetley replied, "Of course."

Although Houston Ballet's press release said of Voluntaries that "Mr. Tetley conceived of a piece specifically in memoriam for Mr. Cranko and his bereaved company in Stuttgart," the choreographer's own words tend to contradict that statement. "I didn't want to hang a wreath around a ballet," he told me during our interview. "Rather, I wanted to do the most positive thing I could when everything was falling apart." On opening night at the Wortham, during a pre-performance discussion with dance critic Nancy Wozny, Tetley expressed his original intent for Voluntaries even more succinctly. "I knew that I had to do a very strong work," he said to the audience.

And 23 years after its premiere, Voluntaries remains a very strong work.

As Tetley suggested, it is not a sentimental ballet. There is no explicit narrative, though one might ruminate about the situation of the ballet's central couple, who are often isolated on stage and seem headed toward some uncertain fate. Rouben Ter-Artunian's costumes and scenic design are extremely straightforward: white unitards for both the men and women, covered with speckles of colour running along the right length of the body, and a large, similarly speckled planet that looms upstage above the dancers. The ballet's title refers both to the sort of improvised music (from an organ or a trumpet, for example) that happens during certain church services and also to the Italian and Latin roots of the word
(respectively, "to fly" and "to desire").

It's likely that Tetley kept both the scenario and the design simple in view of the score he chose, Poulenc's irrefutable Concerto in G Minor for Organ, Strings and Timpani. "The music spoke to me of this feeling of soaring flight, of desire, fall and recovery, and of the whole cycle of þight and recovery." Wozny's description during the pre-performance discussion was more what I was thinking: "Those big organ chords go right through you," Tetley smiled in agreement. "They're galvanizing."

In Houston, Voluntaries was presented in the middle of a programme collectively called Simple Elegance. Up first was the company's premiere of Hans van Manen's 1971 Grosse Fuge (set to Beethoven), and concluding the show was the world
premiere of Artistic Director Stanton Welch's tongue-in-cheek divertissement to Benjamin Britten, Brigade (think Balanchine's Stars and Stripes meets Lichine's Graduation Ball).At the Sunday afternoon performance later in the run, Welch said he chose ballets by van Manen and Tetley not only because in each there is "one idea explored fully," but also because both dances had influenced him greatly as a young dancer. "They are works made around the time I was born," said Welch, "and they both helped liberate classical ballet." Welch grew up in Australia; Tetley had travelled there to
choreograph a ballet called Gemini, in which Welch's mother had danced.

After the opening night performance in Houston, I thought that Tetley's ballet was the more conservative of the two. The Grosse Fuge is a stark, architectural work that descends into a strange sort of fetishism as it progresses. It's supposed to shock you. The men and women keep to themselves in two distinct groups, and once the events for each group begin to interlace, some wide leather belts serve as the only props on a completely white stage (even the floor was white). Sometimes the men stand in a wide second position with the women grappling at the belt buckles (I thought of dusty museum paintings of hunters carrying dead rabbits at the waist) or the situation is reversed and the women drag the men around. It was somewhat nostalgic to see this work in the early 21st century. I remembered fondly how van Manen's blatant sexual politics had so impressed me 20 years ago, and I was pleased also to discover that Grosse Fuge hardly looks dated on the contemporary stage. What I hadn't quite acknowledged in Tetley's ballet was the subtle and skillful blending of classical ballet and the modern dance techniques that Tetley had learned dancing with such legendary choreographers as Martha Graham and Hanya Holm. Voluntaries is a classical work, no doubt about it. There is a significant preoccupation with épaulement, and also with classical forms of elevation. When Tetley was a dancer,