Name: Brittany Gadbury
Grade: Ninth
Favorite art forms: Dance, theater, orchestra
Favorite artist: Bruce Smith, choreographer for the Northwest African-American Ballet
Quote: "In science, the projects ask you to make connections to this and this and this. When you write papers, it's not just putting down information. You present it, you perform it, you can interpret it another way. It's different, and it challenges you."

"My mom says that when God gives you a gift, you need to use it," says Brittany Gadbury with simple conviction.

Brittany has been blessed with not one, but many gifts. And using them, she is. Ever since her first childhood role as a bunny rabbit in Hansel and Gretel, she has been performing. In ballet classes for tots. In the church choir. In front of Dad's camcorder. At the Vancouver School of Arts and Academics-where multiple interests aren't just encouraged, they're required-she sings, she acts, she plays violin. But dance is her real passion. When the Portland-based dance troupe, the Northwest African-American Ballet, performed at the arts magnet last year, she "fell in love" with the work of choreographer Bruce Smith.

"Oh my gosh, that was the most beautiful, awesome thing I ever saw in my whole life!" she says.

In an afternoon dance warm-up, Brittany jumps and spins fluidly inside a tight cluster of other dancers, passing just millimeters from their twirling bodies, yet never colliding with them. In a gray tunic and floppy black pants, her thick hair wound into two tight knots, Brittany has an aura of studied serenity-a certainty about who she is and where she's going. Committed to her Christian faith and eager to relearn the Spanish she picked up from a childhood nanny, she looks with excitement toward a future bursting with possibilities-from an inner-city ministry to a return to the Dominican Republic where she spent last summer with a church group.

"I want to blend in dance and theater any way I possibly can, no matter what I do," she says.

But she admits that her devotion to the arts hasn't always been so rock solid. She went through "a little phase" when she questioned her commitment. Was art "just pointless?" she asked herself. An irrelevant world unto itself?

"Nobody knows about it or focuses on it in the other world-the world of sports and technical stuff, you know, and business. I'm like, no one even cares. Why should I do something that no one's going to care about?"

Her questioning brought her full circle to the place she had begun. In the end, her doubts didn't shake her core belief that art is "an amazing thing." She concluded that art "can be incorporated" meaningfully in the mainstream of life and work.

Brittany's parents, both educators (her mom's an ESL coordinator and her dad's a math teacher), moved the family north from Long Beach, California, driven out by crowds and gangs when Brittany was in grade school. She marvels at the lack of "Gs"-gangsters or wannabes -at the arts magnet. She can recall only two or three fights at the school during its three-year history, and those were of the "one swing, it's done" variety, she says.

"The vandalism thing doesn't happen," she says. When some girls smeared the boys' restroom with makeup and Vaseline for an April Fools prank, the other students "were really, really angry," Brittany recalls. "There's so much respect for the janitors. People really respect them and defend them."