Modern dance is an art as elusive as it is great. No one has ever offered an all-inclusive, totally satisfying definition if it. No one can point to its date of birth or place of origin. Yet something known as modern dance does exist and, despite periodic attempts to pronounce it dead, modern dance continues to flourish.

Modern dance has been an art of such disparate manifestations that it is hard to determine what they have in common. Even the stage attire of modern dancers has been bewilderingly varied. They have worn Grecian tunics, as if to evoke a Hellenic golden age. They have let tights or costumes resembling gymnasium outfits emphasize the physical robustness of movement. Austere skirts or robes have made modern dancers seem priests and priestesses. On other occasions, modern dancers have totally concealed their bodies in order to be seen as pieces of moving sculpture.

Glen Tetley

Modern dance is frequently referred to as an American art. The critic Clive Barnes called it that in 1978 when he said that modern dance "is one of the only, possibly apart from jazz, the only indigenous American art form." About a decade later, Paul Taylor employed similar language when he declared modern dance to be "the one art form other than jazz that can be called truly American."

If America yearned for illumination, Europe, despite its own political upheavals, seemed ablaze with light. Thanks to Thomas A. Edison's invention of the incandescent lamp, lights literally shone through the night at the Paris Universal Exposition of 1889. The London Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851 had been the first of what have come to be known as world's fairs. The nineteenth century loved them. They were signs of technological progress, commercial prosperity, and artistic achievement. The 1889 exposition gave Paris the Eiffel Tower, that remarkable combination of engineering and whimsy, and a now-demolished Palace of Machines crammed with inventions. The fair's Palace of Fine Arts offered, among other attractions, the largest display of American painting that had ever been seen in Europe. There were comparable revelations at the Paris Exposition of 1900, a fair that put at least a few examples of modern dance on view.

"I would rather go to Europe than to heaven," said the American painter William Merritt Chase. Isadora Duncan, the iconoclastic American dancer, agreed. "America is the land where they drink lemonade," she said. "And how can one dance on lemonade?" To American writers, artists and dancers, Europe may have seemed livelier than heaven and more intoxicating than lemonade. Europe seethed with cultural ferment.

Modern dance appears to have acquired its multitude of meanings by a process of evolution. During the early twentieth century, perceptive writers and sensitive dancers began to feel that significant changes were occurring in dance. In Der Moderne Tanz, a book of 1910, Ernst Schur asserted that, although the old ballet was dead, dance had nevertheless become an important part of modern culture; among the dancers he cited as evidence of choreographic rejuvenation was Isadora Duncan, Elizabeth Duncan (Isadora's older sister by six years), Rita Sacchetto, Ruth St Denis, the Wiesenthal Sisters and exponents of the new Russian ballet. On 16 May 1911 at the Teatro dell'Accademia dei Filo-drammatici in Milan, Rita Sacchetto - as much of a modern dancer as her now more famous contemporaries Duncan and St. Denis - offered a recital which the printed program announced as an example of "sue creazioni mimo-drammatiche di danze moderne" (her mimo-dramatic creations of modern dance).

The American choreographer Paul Taylor once asked himself, "Modern dance? To me, modern dance is a license to do what I feel worth doing without somebody saying that I can't do it because it does not fit into a category." And, oxymoronic with accuracy, Dominique Dupuy, a French choreographer, has defined modern dance as "L'Indélébile Ephémère": the indelible ephemeral.

Glen Tetley Voluntaries, 1973

One of the fascinating things about Paul Taylor is that he is never quite the sort of choreographer one assumes he is at any given moment. As soon as a rule can be formulated about him, he may provide his own set of exceptions. Early in his career, he confounded audiences with dances which came close to being motionless (motionless, at least in terms of the canons of modern dance which prevailed at the time), while critics chided him for his weakness for Dada. But just as one was about to categorize him in terms of one avant-garde tendency, he increasingly began to choreograph another kind of dance, a kind which delighted new audiences even as it dismayed some old admirers.

Like many of Taylor's dances, Runes (1975) is a work which is very different from the sort of work it superficially appears to be. Just as Esplanade (1975) may seem like something left over from an evening at Judson Church, but isn't, so Runes may seem like a Glen Tetley ballet, but isn't. Runes, like many Tetley ballets, is ritualistic. But the way in which Taylor and Tetley differ may be seen by contrasting Runes with Tetley's Sacre du Printemps, as presented by American Ballet Theatre.

Tetley's Sacre showed no allegiance to its once-notorious premier, which occasioned fist-fights in the orchestra and orgasms in the balcony. His is an anthology of references in mythic patterns and archetypes beloved by anthropologists, occultists, and psychoanalysts. During the course of the ballet one beholds the prophet or king who must die to save his people, the woman as life force, and resurrected martyr (who, in the ballet's final moments, is specifically compared with Christ). Sacre is filled with references to culture. Taylor too, makes cultural references - though much more indirectly. The big difference between the choreographers, however, is that while Tetley is content merely to refer to culture, Taylor actually creates a culture.

Glen Tetley Sacre du Printemps

Glen Tetley, the innovative choreographer who fused ballet and modern dance, died last month in Palm Beach, Florida. His generous spirit, his compassionate kindness and his ability to articulate the mysteries and complexities of dance will be hugely missed.

Glenford Andrew Tetley, dancer and choreographer: born Cleveland, Ohio, 3 February 1926. He had completed a two-year pre-medical school course, under the aegis of naval training school, and, at the end of the Second World War, enrolled in Columbia Medical School where he graduated with a science degree in 1948. At the age of 19 he decided to become a dancer.

When Glen Tetley was first asked to choreograph a work for the Royal Ballet in London in 1970 he felt such an unwelcome outsider that "in the audition process, I decided I'd pick anyone who looked at me and smiled." The company's classical dancers, who had never encountered contemporary choreography and electronic music before, were deeply uneasy at the prospect. "They thought I was a modern intrusion into the sacred precincts of the Royal Ballet," he said. "So I chose two smilers, Deanne Bergsma and Desmond Kelly, and locked them together in a sort of double yoga position as a counter to the company's desire to distance itself."

Tetley pioneered the synthesis of ballet and modern dance, extending the possibilities of expressive movement by highly trained bodies. He claimed it had not been a conscious decision: he simply drew on the techniques he had learned as a dancer using whatever seemed appropriate for what he wanted to do.

Initially, he came under fire from purists in both camps for imperiling the integrity of dance forms with separate traditions. Then other choreographers seized on the range of movement vocabulary he had opened up, and the distinctions between ballet and contemporary dance became forever optional.

Voluntaries (1973) was a turning point in his career, and still ranks as one of his most significant creations. Choreographed for Stuttgart Ballet at the end of 1973, Voluntaries was a loving memorial to John Cranko, that company's director, who had died prematurely, just months earlier, during a flight that was bringing the company back to Europe, following an immensely successful American tour.

Even before Cranko's untimely death at the age of 45, Tetley had been scheduled to begin working in Stuttgart. He had agreed with Cranko that he would join the company as a resident choreographer. "John had said to me that I should come and take the heat off him. He was being heavily criticized by parts of the German press and public for doing 'old-fashioned' story ballets like Onegin."

Set to Poulenc's monumental Concerto in G minor for organ, strings and timpani, Voluntaries is a luxurious combination of intense mysticism and soaring rhythmic drive, enhanced by Rouben Ter-Arutunian's sleekly powerful designs. His setting is reminiscent of cathedral's shimmering rose window.

Tetley draws from many sources for his ballets: nature, movement forms like tai chi and literature. "I live in a 16th century tower in northern Italy," he muses. "It's surrounded by vineyards and rolling hills. You look out your window and you know that Bacchus lives."