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Noelani Pantastico, a principal dancer with the Pacific Northwest Ballet, will take her final bow as a professional dancer this weekend in the PNB’s production of “Roméo et Juliette” at McCaw Hall.

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Pantastico is retiring after a 25-year career, and she told Seattle’s Morning News her feelings are mixed.

“I’ve been doing this my whole life,” she said. “At a certain point, you’ve got to leave it behind and I’m ready to take that next step. But, of course, sad, and just trying to enjoy these last few days already having 25 years as a professional dancer is a dream. I got to live out my dream.”

That next step for Pantastico will be teaching.

“I get to give back all that I’ve learned in this profession to the next generations,” she said. “I’m just so excited to do that. It feels really right.”

To become a professional dancer, Pantastico says you have to have good training, a good mindset, and a good support system.

“Because I had good training — at the school that I’m actually going to teach at after this — that set me up for success,” she said. “I got into a company when I was around 16 years old, which is kind of young, maybe not nowadays but it was back then. I just went into it with gusto, and I was very fiery when I was younger. I didn’t really care about anything else around me, I just wanted to dance.”

Being a changemaker

Pantastico’s father is Hawaiian and Filipino, and her mother is from Australia. She said her background has played a role in her career, but she doesn’t necessarily see herself as “a changemaker.”

“I don’t know that I was a changemaker,” she said. “But just being a ballerina of Hawaiian, Filipino descent inadvertently made me a changemaker, I guess one could say.”

“Even when I had first gotten into the company, I had a lot of Asian, Filipino dancers writing me and telling me ‘thank you,’ ‘you made me realize that I could be in this culture,’ ‘you made me believe,’ ‘I saw someone that looked like me.'”

She says that’s what we need to see more and more of moving forward.

“So I guess in that way, I’ve been part of the conversation,” she added.

As far as inclusivity for different body types in dance, Pantastico thinks that’s changing.

“Body types are changing and we’re seeing that more and more, kind of scatted throughout dance companies, but that’s something that’s going to take time,” she said.

She also noted that sometimes it’s about being in the right company. Pantastico herself is 5’5″ or 5’4″ and has “muscles, curves,” she says, rather than that “slight, tall, lengthy body.”

“My dancing has to make me look long and tall and bigger than what I am,” she said. “So it’s been a struggle. And there were certain companies even when I was younger that I looked at and I thought, ‘I would love to dance there’ but I just kind of knew that I wouldn’t fit in.”

Final performance

As for this weekend, as she takes the stage for her last performance, Pantastico says she hopes the audience gets wrapped up in the story.

“It’s not about me,” she said. “This performance is about the story, and it’s about love. I’m just a vessel trying to help that story. And if people enjoy it and cry with me at the end, that’s wonderful.”

Find tickets for the final weekend of Jean-Christophe Maillot’s “Roméo et Juliette” performed by the PNB, and the final performance for Noelani Pantastico, .

Listen to Seattle’s Morning News with Dave Ross and Colleen O’Brien weekday mornings from 5 – 9 a.m. on ³ÉÈËXÕ¾ Newsradio, 97.3 FM. Subscribe to the podcast here.