DANCE : Creating ‘Alice’: Glen Tetley in Wonderland

TORONTO —  “But then,” thought Alice, “shall I never get any older than I am now? That’ll be a comfort, one way--never to be an old woman....”

Across the street from a small, formal Victorian park and the imposing Cathedral Church of St. James stands palatial St. Lawrence Hall: the center of the city’s cultural life when it was built in 1850 and currently the home of National Ballet of Canada.

Throughout the building, the company is busy preparing for its first visit to Southern California in 11 years. The tour begins Thursday at the San Diego Civic Theatre, then moves to Pasadena Civic Auditorium on May 30 and winds up at the Orange County Performing Arts Center with a six-day run starting June 7.

In a studio on the third floor that looks out on the cold sky and bare branches of a very wintry May, choreographer Glen Tetley rehearses “Alice,” his hourlong, 2-year-old ballet about the afternoon in 1862 when Lewis Carroll improvised the story that eventually became “Alice in Wonderland.”

Alice Pleasance Liddell was 10 and family friend Carroll (a.k.a. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) 30 on that day, but Tetley presents them both as radiant innocents, soul mates playing in the wonderland of memory.

The White Rabbit, Ugly Duchess, Mad Hatter, March Hare, Dormouse, Mock Turtle, Gryphon and Queen of Hearts all appear in the ballet. But today Tetley is working on the biographical episodes: stormy, psychosexual passages where the grown-up, married Alice (“Alice Hargreaves”) watches her younger self (“Child Alice”), then painfully comes to terms with her long-buried feelings for Carroll and their influence on her life.

Two Alices? Why not? “This curious child was very fond of pretending to be two people,” Carroll wrote. Tetley takes him at his word.

Because of Karen Kain’s pregnancy, Martine Lamy will be dancing Alice Hargreaves for the first time on the California tour. Tetley speaks quietly to her as they rehearse, patiently guiding her through the complex double duets in which Alice and Reginald Hargreaves, husband and wife, interact with and sometimes mirror the dancing of Child Alice and Lewis Carroll.

“Push with the whole body,” he instructs her, demonstrating the movement. “Pull your top body around.” Lamy clearly feels a bit overwhelmed and apologizes frequently, but Tetley calms her and proceeds.

Rehearsals for John Cranko’s “Onegin” (also on the California tour) have left Tetley with just one male dancer at this session: Peter Ottmann, who portrays Carroll and Hargreaves in different casts. Today he alternates between the characters as needed. (“Whom do I do?” he asks at one point, sounding like the inquisitive “Alice in Wonderland” Caterpillar, another of his roles in the ballet.) Tetley himself stands in for Hargreaves when the partnering intricacies of the linked duets demand a second male.

More than the antic, anarchic Wonderland scenes, these yearning, fantasy confrontations represent the core of the ballet, the point where it most potently reflects its obsessively rhapsodic accompaniment: David Del Tredici’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Child Alice Part I: In Memory of a Summer Day.”

Composed for soprano and orchestra, Del Tredici’s score incorporates the text of Carroll’s prefatory poem to “Through the Looking Glass.” It speaks of a love made impossible by time (“I and thou are half a life asunder”) but somehow sustained through art (“the magic words shall hold thee fast”). The ballet, too, centers on bittersweet longings across the years and what Carroll called “the love-gift of a fairy-tale.”

It ends with Alice in her 80s, reminiscing about the most important day in her life and a certain white rabbit--an image that Tetley says came to him during his extensive research on the project.

“I was very moved by one of the very last photographs of Alice Hargreaves when she came to New York in 1932 to be awarded a doctorate from Columbia University simply for being the original inspiration for ‘Alice in Wonderland,’ ” he recalls.

“To see this older woman there who you know is the original Alice, this little girl, it was very touching. She had married very well, but she lost her sons in the First World War, she lost her husband and she finally had to sell off all her possessions and was completely alone at the end.”

“Although Lewis Carroll says in that poem, ‘No thought of me shall find a place/ In thy young life’s hereafter,’ she held on to that memory. That book was the last thing she sold . . .”

A Shift for Choreographer

A character-based period piece, “Alice” represents a startling departure for Tetley, an American choreographer who has earned a major international reputation for abstract movement essays that combine the weight and floor action of modern dance with the line and aerial virtuosity of ballet.

His early training embraced both contemporary (Hanya Holm) and classical (Antony Tudor) disciplines. His performing career was also divided between modern dance and ballet, and, as a choreographer, he has increasingly explored juxtaposing these idioms, overlapping them, fusing them.

“I remember years ago I read the books of Loren Eiseley and in ‘The Immense Journey’ he said that evolution does not happen with the big fish in the middle of the stream,” Tetley says. “It’s where the water meets the earth, and things have to struggle to adapt between two mediums, where the magic happens and the first step is made.”

“That has always struck me as truth--and that’s where I wanted to be: in that area where things were spawning and growing. I’ve never felt comfortable with being a big fish in the middle of a stream.”

Although Tetley briefly served as artistic director of the Netherlands Dance Theatre and, later, the Stuttgart Ballet, most of his career has been spent as a free-lance choreographer--a creative nomad. Now, however, the father of the unitard ballet is suddenly a very big fish indeed in Canadian dance: the choreographer of a hit story-ballet inspired by a literary classic and, more recently, a fixture at a national cultural institution.

Tetley admits the inconsistency. “It wasn’t a cerebral decision,” he says. “It was something that I felt at that moment I wanted to do. In whatever I’ve done I’ve just followed my intuition.”

“When I did ‘Alice,’ I didn’t arbitrarily think, ‘Should I make it contemporary or classical?’ I knew I wanted to go into a kind of never-never world, and I could only visualize it in those terms with the very Romantic quality of that music.

“Also, I’m 62 now and I don’t know how much longer I’ll be physically able to choreograph. I certainly will never be able to go on as long as some of my teachers. Maybe that sense of age makes things release in you. You stop pushing for new frontiers and say, ‘This is what I am, this is what I do.”

He acknowledges the influence of the Canadian dancers on the style of “Alice.”

“I respect the National Ballet for its fine school,” he says, “for the fact that so many of the dancers in the company come from the school, that with the repertory they’ve had in the past they have experience in handling acting roles and delight in that.

“Also, they’ve had little exposure to contemporary dance and I didn’t want to push them into heavy floor work or body-contact improvisation. I myself didn’t want to do that. I didn’t want to work with electronic music as I have in the past. And I know I was struck by the youth of some of the people and their unique qualities.

“I was watching class and I saw Kimberly Glasco, a dancer from Eugene, Ore. She was briefly in American Ballet Theatre, in the corps, and not used at all. But she has such purity and lyricism of movement, such an absolutely extraordinary technique, that she looked as though she had a special light on her. I knew immediately that I wanted to do ‘Alice’ on her.”

Erik Bruhn’s Legacy

Tetley credits the great Danish ballet star Erik Bruhn with making “profound changes” in National Ballet of Canada that led to the emergence of extraordinary young talents.

“Erik made the company much more conscious of training, of being inspired to very high levels onstage and re-examining what is the most potent thing in choreography and dancing, which is the movement itself,” he says.

Bruhn took over as National Ballet of Canada artistic director in 1983. Before that, recalls current principal dancer Gregory Osborne, “the company was like a stagnant pool. Unless someone left or died you couldn’t move up.”

Bruhn immediately shook up the roster and suddenly there was room at the top. A new generation of dancers replaced the aging, entrenched figureheads of yore.

He went further, undertaking a radical shift in priorities--a shift that has been upheld since Bruhn’s death in 1986 by his assistants, Valerie Wilder and Lynn Wallis.

“It hasn’t been all happy,” Wilder emphasizes. “I think in the course of the first six months that Erik and I were here we probably fired practically every head of our departments.”

In the United States, National Ballet of Canada had been known for its lavish productions of 19th-Century classics--and as a backup ensemble for Rudolf Nureyev. To foster a new sense of company identity and independence, Bruhn radically revamped and updated the repertory.

“In many ways (founder) Celia Franca did us a great service by putting very nice versions of the classics into the rep very early on in our history,” Wilder explains.

“That’s a wonderful heritage to have. But we were short of major 20th-Century works. Balanchine was neglected, so were Kylian and MacMillan--and Tetley. Toronto audiences would have no chance to see an important work such as (Tetley’s) ‘Voluntaries.’ Many of our dancers had never seen it, much less experienced (danced) it, so for our company it became absolutely essential.”

Veteran principal Karen Kain says that for years she accepted guest engagements in Europe--often for Roland Petit in Marseilles--”because the National was not giving me anything interesting to do.”

No longer. “I think I’ve been busier with the National in the last three years than in my whole career,” Kain says.

Significantly, all of the ballets for the California tour are 20th-Century works. These project “the image of a company revived, strong, growing, very much bursting out of its stereotypes of the past,” Wilder says. Erik Bruhn wanted it that way.

Milestone: No Nureyev

One of the first choreographers that Bruhn approached for an original ballet was Tetley--and that ballet turned out to be “Alice.” Its success in Toronto confirmed the reforms of the Bruhn regime and led to a milestone for the company: a 1986 engagement at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City without Nureyev or any other guest stars.

Soon after, Wilder and Wallis invited Tetley to join National Ballet of Canada in an official capacity: Artistic Associate.

“We found in the course of bringing ‘Alice’ to New York and having conversations with Glen that he was not only one of the greatest choreographers of this century but one of the best minds in dance today,” Wilder says.

“He knows the dancers very well, he knows what level all the ballets are at and he’s very interested in the other (non-Tetley) works as well,” adds Wallis.

“He’s also very knowledgeable about stage lighting and all the crafts that go with it. So he’s been an extremely useful and important influence for us as well as for the dancers.”

And his ballets continue to be hits with the Canadian press and public. Late last year, Tetley created “La Ronde” (based on Arthur Schnitzler’s play): 10 pas de deux, back to back, tracing a cycle of seduction through the various strata of Viennese society. Next season a third new work is scheduled--along with a production of his “Daphnis and Chloe.”

Tetley confesses to having had “great doubts” about attaching himself in any way with a company again. And he insists that he is not a candidate for National Ballet of Canada artistic director, a position that will be vacant in two years.

“I have said that I’m here not as director because I have done that before in my life and I do not want that responsibility,” he declares.

“I think the company knows that when I’m here, my whole heart and mind is for the National Ballet of Canada, for my works, for the quality of dancing onstage, for every detail. But I’m not foreseeing 30 years in the future being at the top of this company. I think if it’s strong and vital and working, who knows how long? But the most important thing is keeping it working at this moment, right now.”

Where, then, does he foresee being in 30 years?

He smiles at the prospect. “I was talking last year to a wonderful old woman in Spoleto (Italy), who has written the story of her life,” he says. “She’s in her late 80s now--a remarkable woman. She’s been through a lot of history and she said, ‘You know, at my age life has become so free.’

“ ‘I spent all my life with guilt: at not doing enough for my parents, at relationships to my husband and my lovers and my friends. More and more, as I grow older, the freer I am. I don’t have to feel guilty if I don’t want to do anything.’

“She’s so free now,” Tetley says with wonder. “It should always be that way.”