A fresh breeze from the Pacific

The much-admired Pacific Northwest Ballet, which visits London next week, is a company strongly under the influence of Balachine. But, as Nadine Meisner discovers on a visit to its home in Seattle, it is shaped even more by the values of American contemporary culture

It's 5am and lighted windows in the office block opposite my hotel indicate that some employees are already at work. But, hey, this is the USA, and even more to the point, Seattle, stamping ground of the entrepreneurial spirit. Situated far north, under vaporous skies, this is a city of boldly modern architecture and grid-system streets that pitch vertiginously into the Pacific Ocean. Growing out of timbering, the Gold Rush, and its gateway position to Alaska, Seattle today is smallish and somewhat provincial, but its tentacles spread round the world, through local giants that are called Microsoft, Boeing, Starbucks – and dance's own, unforgettable Mark Morris.

With wealth come the luxuries of life, such as culture. American business is a lavish benefactor of American arts – it has to be, given the near-absence of state or national subsidy – and Seattle has more than its fair share. There is the luxurious Benaroya Hall, housing the high-profile Seattle Symphony orchestra; there is the Seattle Repertory Theater and several art museums. There is also a temple to rock'n'roll and Seattle's son Jimi Hendrix, erected by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and designed by the Bilbao Guggenheim architect Frank Gehry. The building is called EMP, Experience Music Project, a name as thumpingly prosaic as the city's Pacific Northwest Ballet, now making a return visit to London.

PNB's 1999 London season came a year after its European debut at the Edinburgh Festival, and drew admiring audiences for its production of Balanchine's A Midsummer Night's Dream, which was also shown on the BBC. The company's link with Balanchine is close: Kent Stowell and Francia Russell, the husband and wife who have directed the company since 1977, were both dancers with Balanchine's New York City Ballet. Russell later became ballet mistress there, and one of the first specialists designated by the Balanchine Trust to mount the master's ballets. But PNB is no second-league NYCB. Although the mixed bill in London includes Balanchine's Divertimento No 15, it also reflects the broad mix of the company's repertoire, from 19th-century Petipa to the European modern classicism of Nacho Duato.

"And even if there is a strong Balanchine influence," says Russell, "we don't teach Balanchine technique. In his own lifetime, Balanchine kept shifting, but now his technique has become as if set in aspic, with certain things exaggerated."

This is confirmed by Patricia Barker, the company's leading ballerina. "Obviously the style is built around his influence, and the aim is to keep the long muscles and lean look he created, but a lot also comes from Francia, with more emphasis on the upper body and port de bras. Basically, she has given us a technique that allows us to adapt to the different styles of choreographers coming in to work with us." Does the company have a special quality? "Yes; versatility. Instead of it being beaten into you that there's only one way, you learn there are different ways, you learn to open your minds up so you can adapt."

Barker, who joined in 1980 aged 17, remembers the early days (the company was launched in 1972) when Russell and Stowell did everything themselves. "She taught classes, and if there wasn't a young choreographer to mount a new ballet, he'd do it. They worked really hard and were raising three sons at the same time, and we were their extended family. It felt very hands-on. We were also their first products, coming in from the company's school."

Under Russell's direction, the PNB School supplies 60 per cent of the company. And, apparently, so huge is the local demand for ballet classes that it is acquiring larger premises, large enough for 1,000 pupils and scheduled to open in the autumn. Over at the other, company, end, the talk is also of expansion, with the major $125m redevelopment of the 3,000-seat Seattle Opera House that PNB shares with the Seattle Opera. It is due for completion next summer, under its new name of the Marion Oliver McCaw Hall (nicknamed Mom Hall), after the mother of two benefactors. This building, like Gehry's EMP, is at the Seattle Center, a campus originally established for the 1962 World Fair and now to be transformed into a recreational and educational site "for people of all cultures and incomes". Alongside is the Mercer Arts Arena, a skating and hockey rink, refurbished by the PNB as a temporary theatre for some of its programmes, while its long-lasting Nutcracker (choreography by Stowell and designs by Maurice Sendak) will be housed elsewhere, at the Paramount Theatre.

The Nutcracker depressingly accounts for 38 out of PNB's 90 annual performances, and provides half of its box-office earnings, which makes Seattle audiences not so different from British ones. Box-office provides half of the company's total $14.5m turnover, the rest comes principally from the company's $10m endowment fund and private and corporate sponsorship. So what do you do when the USA economy hits rock bottom? You just keep going, finding the new sponsors, who allegedly exist out there, to compensate for the decline in existing ones.

You also make sure that sponsorship for London is signed and sealed before steaming ahead. PNB has evidently decided that the UK is a prime spot for the overseas tours it undertakes every other year. But internal touring is strictly limited to a few appearances in Washington, DC and New York. American sponsorship produces a localised mindset at odds with the national commitment of subsidised touring companies in the UK. PNB's priority goes to serving its Seattle supporters, not to audiences in Oklahoma or New Orleans.

So Oklahoma and New Orleans won't get to see Stowell's full-evening tribute to Jerome Kern entitled Silver Lining, but London will. "It's about," says Stowell, "everything that I know of American music theatre, expressed in dance." As well as jitterbugging and chorus-line high-kicking, though, the dancers sing some of the 36 Kern numbers that Stowell has sifted from a boggling total of 800, the result of exhaustive research. Patricia Barker dances two pas de deux, the second a Ginger Rogers-Fred Astaire pastiche, against projected film of the original dancing couple.

Taller and more willowy than Rogers, Barker has the archetypal Balanchine physique, with long hyper-extended legs and arched feet. It's the kind of body that often lacks strength but, under Russell's coaching, she has built the power to dance the most challenging classical roles. She is also something of a Stowell muse, with roles in every one of his ballets bar one. That stimulus, alongside a varied repertoire, has ensured that she never felt the need to cast her sights elsewhere. "I moved up the ranks quickly and interesting parts kept coming at the right intervals for me to be fulfilled."

Although she still slides banisters à la Jamie Oliver (an affectation indulged in front of complete strangers such as journalists), Patricia Barker nonetheless has a more grown-up angle to her life, started two years ago with her sister. This is BK Wear, a firm manufacturing and selling practice clothes for female dancers. It is so successful that 85 per cent of the women dancers at the American Ballet Theatre, the USA's second largest company, buy it, and she is now launching a men's line. She designs the clothes, supervises the workshop, buys the fabrics. "So when I go guesting and touring, I visit the fabric stores, rather than the museums or the sites, in my spare time."

American entrepreneurship, it would seems not only supports the company from the outside, but permeates right to its very heart.

Pacific Northwest Ballet is at Sadler's Wells Theatre, London EC1 (020-7863 8000) from 2-9 July