Last Dance: Seattle's premier ballerina ends long career

For more than a quarter of a century, there's been one constant at Pacific Northwest Ballet -- dancer Patricia Barker.

Dancers come and go every season. It is the nature of the art form. But Barker has been a principal dancer for two decades, a member of the company for 25 years and was previously a student at its school.

She represents the crème de la crème, the best and the brightest, the prima ballerina, even though the term is never used.

Five years ago, the company held a 20th anniversary celebration in her honor at the Opera House, the first time any PNB dancer has been so acclaimed. At the time she made one thing very clear: The gala was not her retirement party.

Now, an amazing 43 years old, strong and vital, elegant and polished, as youthful and beautiful as ever, Barker has decided to retire at the end of the 2006-07 season.

"I've been thinking about retirement for a few years," she said the other day between rehearsals for the local premiere of George Balanchine's full-length "Jewels" Thursday night.

"I wanted to do it at the right time. There were a lot of factors to consider, but next year is good. I will have stayed for the first two years of Peter" -- Peter Boal, the company's new artistic director -- "coming in and creating a new future for PNB. I am very happy to have stayed."

No dancer has been at PNB as long as Barker or played as central a role in the development of a fledging little troupe into a national company. She is recognized in the dance world outside Seattle as well as at home. "People always whisper her name when she comes on stage," Boal said. "She is the most-known face and foot and has the most presence of all the dancers at PNB."

"What is remarkable," he said, is that not only is she still dancing but how well she is dancing. "She is at her peak with a presence on stage that has authority. She has ballerina magic."

Artistry and physicality

Not only has Barker sustained her physicality, a huge achievement in a world predicated on being young, but her artistry. She took natural attributes -- an extremely flexible body, beautiful proportions, sheer strength -- and transformed them into a high-gloss technique, immaculate and dazzling, that made her reputation. As for the art, she came to possess finish, a long line, aristocratic command and refinement.

Clement Crisp, the dean of English dance critics who has seen everyone and everything over the past half century, called Barker "very gifted."

"Tall, blond, she is a ballerina (in the real, old-fashioned sense of a much-abused word) with all that implies of maturity, command of effect, technical grace," he wrote in the Financial Times. "Her line is clear, fine-drawn, flowing from an expressive torso. ... Like that supreme artist (English dancer Alicia Markova), Barker can also float a pirouette around her and make us savor its trace on the air. She has ... an air of assurance -- not girlish, but womanly -- which brings a lovely gravity to her dancing. I think her a joy."

Dance has been a part of Barker's life since she was 7, when her parents shipped her off to local dance classes in the Tri-Cities that included hula, jazz, tap, "anything that would keep me in the studio. I loved just moving. I was a rather shy girl, and movement was my form of expression."

Her native gifts were quickly realized by her teacher, Lynne Williams, a former soloist with Boston Ballet. At 15, she sent Barker to Boston to study, but that was too "far away from home," so the next summer it was Pacific Northwest Ballet. In 1979, she moved to Seattle permanently to study at the school. She joined the company as an apprentice in 1981, was promoted to the corps de ballet in 1982, soloist in 1984 and principal in 1986. She was 23.

Her realization about wanting to dance came a few years earlier, when New York City Ballet performed at the Opera House. "I don't remember who danced, but I do remember the sensation of walking across the empty stage and looking into the empty house. I knew then, this is what I wanted to."

Living alone in an apartment, finishing high school in Edmonds, the only school at the time that would allow the kind of split schedule Barker needed, and studying dance were her daily routine. The rigorous life ballet demands for success was coupled with her own sense of youthful exuberance, or wildness as Barker and others have called it. She could also be wild in the studio and got fired at the end of her first season in the corps, to be immediately rehired.

A husband who cooks

"I tried to grasp what was going on," she said. "I got a lot of attention, I was always challenging myself and doing well, something I had not done in school. This was the place for me to excel. But it was not until I got fired that I decided I had to concentrate on what I was doing if I wanted to be a dancer. I didn't understand what it meant to be focused. So I developed a regime I follow today."

It was also the year she started dating Michael Auer, a principal dancer with PNB and considered a catch among the women in the company for his good looks and Viennese accent. He was a little older and wise in the ways of the world, to paraphrase Barker. "He helped me decide what I needed to do."

They lived together for years in a house on Queen Anne. Then one day, in 1999, on the anniversary of the day they starting dating, they quietly got married. Along the way, Barker discovered, very pleasantly, that he could cook. Really cook.

Good thing, because the 5-foot-7 Barker likes to eat. She freely admits, with a laugh, that she cannot cook, at all, not even brownies from a box, which she tried to do for his birthday this month but managed to burn on the top and undercook on the bottom. She swears that she read the directions carefully. She had. The problem was the wrong oven setting, according to Auer.

"I don't have stage fright," she said, "but I do worry about getting hungry before a performance. I have so much energy. I can't really eat, so I always have a bag of Skittles in my dressing room."

She has long relied on Auer's advice. "He provides me with a good home life and tells me when I complain, 'Fix it or get over it.' " When she was about 37, she said, she began to feel the effects of being older. "My recovery time was taking longer, and I was tired the day after a full-length. I told Michael that I was tired, that I hurt a little bit, that I had never experienced these feelings before. He said, 'Now you know what the rest of us feel like at 25.' "

Boal said her longevity on stage is not just luck. She has a terrific maintenance program: "always in class, a diligent worker who rarely takes time off. She also loves what she is doing."

Although she has had sprains in her left and right feet, a break in the right foot, hostile encounters between her nose and a pointe shoe and elbow, a crack in her spine and problems with her left knee, she has not suffered serious injuries. The worst fear she had was a bulging disc on her sciatic nerve. Fortunately, injections cured that.

Dance, she reminds those who have never done it at a serious level, "is a contact sport." "Injuries happen to everyone."

She clearly remembers a sprain that occurred during the coda of the pas de deux for the Sugar Plum Fairy and the Prince in the last act of "The Nutcracker." She shouted, sort of, to her partner, quickly changed the steps so she wouldn't have to stand on the injured leg alone and managed to finish the performance without falling.

She also remembers, as clearly, getting food poisoning before a performance of Balanchine's "Agon," with no one to take her role. So the stage manager called for trash cans at all exits and entrances in the wings, and she went on stage, with everyone alerted, including conductor Stewart Kershaw, that she might have to make a quick departure. She didn't, but she did use the trash cans.

In a career that has had multiple challenges -- including once having to practically sustain the company when most of its female principals left only months apart -- one of the greatest was dancing Aurora in "Sleeping Beauty" for the first time at the age of 37. "That was the hardest."

Other great roles include Titania in Balanchine's "A Midsummer Night's Dream," which she dances with a noble style and temperament, and Odette/Odile in "Swan Lake," which she has enriched in the 20-some years she has been dancing the dual role. She says she is partial to Balanchine's "black and white ballets," such as "Four Temperaments," "Agon" and "Violin Concerto."

"I love those ballets."

She is getting into Balanchine's full-length "Jewels," which closes the company's 2005-06 season in early June, having danced various parts in previous performances but not the entire "Diamonds," the closing section of the three-part ballet.

" 'Diamonds' is the right fit for her, with its requirements beyond choreography to balance personality and artistry," Boal said. "For the role to succeed, there has to be elements of allure and authority."

The part was created in 1967 for Suzanne Farrell, who coached Barker and her partner, Stanko Milov, for a couple of hours earlier this year. Other PNB dancers learning the roles watched the process.

"She was very blunt, very inspiring," Barker said. "I learned one important thing: not to do what she did but to do it my own way."

One bone to pick

In general, Barker has been well-treated by PNB, which is why, although she has guested with many major ballet companies, she never left. However, she has one complaint: the manner in which the company treated her in its search for a new artistic director.

When the short list of candidates was announced, her name was not among them, while those of PNB former principals were, some of whom were hardly of the first rank. The fact that she was not mentioned was regarded by many in the community as a gratuitous insult to a star who had done so much for the company, not only in terms of dancing but also as a spokeswoman and helping to secure major gifts.

"I was hurt," she said, "and disappointed in the organization. I felt it didn't recognize what I brought to the table."

Retirement looms ahead, and Barker is thinking about it: maybe the dance world, maybe not; maybe the non-profit world, maybe not; maybe Seattle, maybe not.

She has her line of dancewear, called BKWear, already up and running. She is teaching at the PNB School, doing videos and talking to students about dance. And this summer she goes to Boston to teach for the first time at the school of Boston Ballet, where she has a warm relationship with Mikko Nissinen, its smart and ambitious artistic director. They met when she was a guest at the company and became friends.

When the final day comes and the company mounts some kind of farewell, Barker says, she will have no regrets.

"Some of my best memories are when I am on stage, the curtain goes up and you see the audience's faces illuminated. It is incredible. That will be hard to give up. But not my tendus (the stretched beating of one leg) every day.

"I don't know what it will be like to not dance. I know I have accomplished what I wanted to, and that is immensely satisfying. I also remember that without the kindness and generosity of others, what I have done would not have been possible. And that includes the audience, which has taken every step with me. I am very lucky."

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