Name: Eric Nordstrom
Grade: 12th
Favorite art forms: Theater, dance
Favorite artists: Actors Robin Williams and Kevin Branaugh; playwrights Tom Stoppard and Christopher Durang
Quote: "The beauty of this school is that when you have an idea, the time, teachers, and resources are available to help you pursue that idea. It gives you the means to practice the craft that you're learning-whether it's theater, dance, music, whatever-and to come up with something that's really all yours, that you invented."

The six-year-old magician dazzled the audience with his sleight of hand: pulling a scarf with a flourish from thin air (he'd hidden it cleverly in his armpit), and bravely jabbing pins through his thumb (the "thumb" was actually a carrot draped with a handkerchief).

They didn't know it, but the 400 people laughing appreciatively at the little boy's talent show act were witnessing the birth of an actor. The applause got in his blood. He was hooked.

"It was exciting," Eric Nordstrom recalls of his stage debut 11 years ago. "It made me feel good."

Now finishing his last year at the Vancouver School of Arts and Academics, the intense, engaging young actor has moved far beyond magic tricks to tackle roles such as Sherlock Holmes's sidekick Dr. Watson, and Dr. Gibbs from Thornton Wilder's classic, Our Town. Mostly, though, he relishes working on the "scarce, wonderful plays" that exist on the fringes of the theater. As a sophomore, he won a $900 grant to produce F. Scott Fitzgerald's obscure three-act play Dada Frost -a political satire on the Harding administration in which Eric played a character called The Vegetable. In the five months he spent producing the play, Eric earned history credit for studying U.S. politics in the 1920s and exploring the Dada movement in art and literature of that era, for which the play was named. He earned English credits for the character sketches he wrote. He got physics credit for working on lighting effects-blue light on a blue dress, for example. He got geometry and math credit for set design.

Thanks to a school requirement that students explore all the arts, Eric has found another passion: dance. A highlight of his schooling, in fact, was the "great honor" of taking classes from guest instructor Mary Oslund, a nationally known postmodern dancer from Portland. Trying to mimic the synthesized sounds of "technomusic" that accompanies Oslund's dances ("boww-chkchk-ka-boww, boww-chkchk"), Eric acknowledges that her style is "kinda far out there." But far out there is where Eric wants to be, artistically.

"It's cool," he says. "It's a real rush."

Dance and acting, Eric has discovered, complement one another.

"Similar techniques and principles are being applied in theater and in dance," he says. "So what I'm doing in dance is making the work I'm doing in theater stronger."

Eric, whose mom is a teacher's assistant and whose dad is a retired psychologist, considers himself "very lucky" to have his parents' unconditional support. If his ambitions had veered toward touchdowns instead of pas de deux, he says, they would have been there cheering him on just the same.

While the arts magnet has given Eric the artistic freedom he relishes, he concedes that it's "not meant for everyone." Kids who need a lot of direction from teachers-"read these pages and answer these questions"-would flounder in a school designed for self-directed students, he says. "You really have to be motivated and passionate, and have the commitment to follow through on your ideas."

From college, Eric wants a well-rounded, liberal-arts education. Maybe then he'll consider a conservatory. But he's leaving all avenues open. "One of the things this school has taught me," he says, "is that an academic education helps support what you're doing artistically, and what you're doing artistically helps support what you're doing academically."