Lifestyle

POSTED: Sunday, Aug. 10, 2008

Bellingham ballet school prepares for “Daphnis et Chloé”

The nine shepherdesses lined up in two rows, and John Bishop began putting them through their early paces.

“Arabesque, and everybody up, and everybody turn, and down,” he said as the stereo played Maurice Ravel and the young ballerinas practiced their steps from the closing scene of “Daphnis et Chloé.”

At one point, the girls moved to the rear of the studio dance floor for the entry of the lead dancers, Seth Weatherby as Daphnis and Caitlin Campbell as Chloé. v During their hour-long practice, some of the young girls displayed grace and confidence, while others were a bit shaky.

“We’ll do it again,” Bishop said. “It’s always tough in the beginning.”

The next hour went more smoothly when 17 teen-age dancers — 15 girls and two boys — took the floor. Most of them have many more years of ballet experience, and learned their steps quickly.

It’s how a ballet is built — move by move, hour by hour, day by day.

At Bellingham’s Northwest Ballet School of Classical and Contemporary Dance, the dancers are learning their routines and community members are preparing scenery and costumes for the school’s summer presentation of “Daphnis et Chloé.”

Bishop, the school’s owner and artistic director, has crafted his own choreography about the tale of love between Daphnis, a goat herder, and Chloé, a shepherdess kidnapped by pirates.

The July and August rehearsals are separate from the school’s summer sessions of ballet, jazz and other dance classes.

“What we’re doing is not a recital,” Bishop said. “It’s art.”

BUILDING BALLET

A longtime dancer and choreographer, Bishop is friendly, with an open face, but he’s quietly determined to build a top-notch ballet program in Bellingham, one with strong community support.

“Ballet is like a religion to him,” said Christopher Wise, an English professor at Western Washington University who performed in Northwest Ballet’s recent production of “Aladdin” with his son and daughter. “He’s completely devoted to ballet.”

Bishop was born 50 years ago in Spokane, but spent most of his youth in Milwaukee, where his father worked in the insurance business and his mother was a piano accompanist for the city’s ballet company.

Bishop began dance lessons at the age of 8 and auditioned for the Milwaukee Ballet eight years later. “I liked sports,” he said, “but ballet was more fascinating to me.”

He later moved to New York City, where he met his wife, Mieko, and became a freelance ballet dancer. He has performed with more than 20 professional companies in the United States and in Japan, where he and his wife lived for 10 years and where he began choreographing ballets.

The Bishops returned to this country a decade ago and settled in Anacortes, where they opened a dance school and loved their house high on a hill. They might have stayed there were it not for the untimely death of Eleise Kerman from cancer three years ago at the age of 36.

A Bellingham native, Kerman became ballet mistress for Bellingham’s Morca Academy upon the death of Isabel Morca. In 1996, she opened her own school, Pacific Dance Company.

Bishop had taught some classes at Pacific Dance, and when Kerman died he had the opportunity to move to Bellingham and take over her school.

He moved here two years ago, intrigued by a chance to build a ballet program in a larger city, one with strong arts and university communities and with showcase venues at Western and Mount Baker Theatre.

Today, Bishop has about 180 students at his school. Most take ballet, and most come for daily classes.

Several other dance schools in Whatcom County offer lessons in ballet as well as other dance styles. Bishop considers ballet the anchor of his program, not just one of several styles his school teaches.

“If you’re going to be a stronger dancer, period, you need a strong foundation in classical ballet,” he said.

TAKING THE LEAD

Seth Weatherby is only 16, a junior-to-be at Meridian High, but he landed the lead male role in “Daphnis.”

Baseball is Weatherby’s sport, but he opted to learn ballet in the off-season to improve his flexibility and agility. He likes the discipline and the challenge of ballet and has improved quickly.

Noticeably so; his practice jumps as Daphnis were high and strong.

He performed the title role in “Aladdin,” but says “Daphnis” calls for more dancing, and lots of facial expression to help convey the story.

He says Bishop is demanding, but not overly so.

“He gets out of you what you can give,” Weatherby said, “but he won’t ask for any more.”

Bishop’s productions normally feature all home-grown talent, but “Daphnis,” with a cast of 45, features Caitlin Campbell, a professional dancer from New York, as Chloé.

Campbell is 22 and has been dancing since she was 3. She grew up in Maine and danced for a New Hampshire troupe last fall before moving to New York City.

As young professionals often do, she sent copies of her audition video to various dance companies. Bishop was looking for an able dancer to portray Chloé and offered her a job for the summer.

Tall, lithe and strong, Campbell was happy for the work and happy to visit the Northwest for the first time. She took Bishop up on the offer.

“The choreography is fun and challenging, the music is great to dance to,” she said. “It looks like it will be a good show.”