San Francisco Ballet Set to Show Off Its Strength : Dance: Company will stage U.S. premiere of relentlessly aerobic Glen Tetley piece in San Diego.

When the San Francisco Ballet presents the U.S. premiere of Glen Tetley’s “Tagore” this weekend at the San Diego Civic Theatre, it will be an artistic as well as physical milestone for the company.

A taxing and relentlessly aerobic dance created in 1989 to showcase the top dancers of the National Ballet of Canada, “Tagore” will pointedly highlight the growing strength in the San Francisco Ballet’s principal ranks and the burgeoning stylistic diversity of the company in general. It will also be the newest work in a four-performance residency that will open Tuesday and Wednesday in San Diego with choreographer and San Francisco Ballet Artistic Director Helgi Tomasson’s “The Sleeping Beauty” and finish with a three-part repertory program Friday and Saturday that includes Leonid Jacobson’s “Rodin” and Tomasson’s “Handel--A Celebration.”

Fifty minutes long and based on turn-of-the-century Viennese composer Alexander Zemlinsky’s “Lyric Symphony” and several of Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore’s poems, “Tagore” promises to be quintessential Tetley in its melding of East and West imagery, and modern dance and ballet movement.

Speaking by telephone last week from his San Francisco hotel room, just before his daily rehearsals in the ballet’s gleaming San Francisco Civic Center home, Tetley spoke admiringly of the new technical stamina the ballet has gained under Tomasson’s tutelage. “I admire absolutely what Helgi has done here. He’s built a top professional company,” Tetley said. “I’m particularly impressed by the company’s high level of movement quality.”

Tetley reports that this weekend’s premiere will be the culmination of the San Francisco Ballet’s long-held desire to have Tetley set a work on the company. One of the most well-traveled free-lance choreographers in contemporary ballet, Tetley insists on a long rehearsal period when staging one of his works for a company. Since early September, he has been in San Francisco drilling two full casts of principals and corps members in rehearsals that continued right through Sunday morning, when the company left for San Diego.

“I don’t really like the idea of franchising ballets,” Tetley said flatly. “I like to get to know each dancer because it’s the personal contact where miracles can happen. Only the choreographer can adapt movement to a dancer. The excitement for me is in that moment in the studio, making the impossible possible.”

Making the impossible possible might well be the theme of the 64-year-old Tetley’s long career in dance. Recruited to dance at age 19 when he was persuaded by an English teacher to be a supernumerary for American Ballet Theatre’s “Aurora’s Wedding” in Pittsburgh, Tetley was smitten on the spot.

Beginning in classical ballet, Tetley swiftly branched out to work with the great German Expressionist modern dancer Hanya Holm, then went on to Martha Graham, Agnes de Mille and Jerome Ro1650616686t, American Ballet Theatre, Robbins’ Ballets U.S.A., New York City Opera productions and in several Broadway shows.

“My desire was to be the best dancer in the world,” Tetley said of his ambition. “I wanted to be the dancer every choreographer wanted to work with.” In 1957 he came close to getting his wish when Graham, Holm, Jose Lamon and Lucia Chase all asked him to join their companies. He chose Graham, an association that taught him one of his most highly valued dance lessons--namely, seeing someone of Graham’s talent and stature stumble, lose her way, and finally recover.

The same quality of technical versatility that made Tetley the dancer so attractive to choreographers later made Tetley the choreographer equally desirable among dance company directors. In the early 1960s, Tetley was invited to freshen up the tradition-bound repertoires of both The Netherlands Dance Theatre and London’s Ballet Rambert with an infusion of his trademark classical-modern fusion choreography. The success and acclaim that followed were immediate and prolonged, setting the groundwork for a prosperous European career for the young American choreographer.