Juvie Jazz - juvenile offenders learn jazz dancing - Brief Article

Dance Magazine, April, 2000 by Janice Ross

GIVES TEENS NEW FOOTING

IT IS A CRISP, clear winter afternoon and Ehud Krauss, dressed in sweats and cross-training shoes, is standing impatiently in front of the first of several locked metal security doors at the entrance to Juvenile Hall in San Jose, California. As soon as he is buzzed into this jail for convicted juvenile offenders, Krauss begins teasing the probation officers. "Hey, boss, have a good weekend," he jokes as he passes through, suggesting they will be incarcerated along with the inmates for the weekend.

It takes a generous mix of humor, bravado, and unflagging optimism for Krauss to persist in the task he's given himself. He wants no less than to change the lives of hundreds of at-risk and incarcerated teenaged boys and girls through dance. "I think these kids have a lot of potential," the Israeli-born Krauss says in heavily Hebrew-accented English. "I do pas de bourree with them so they learn structure. They drop out of middle school, forget high school. They have no structure. But I make them trust me. With my background, I can relate to these kids. We are climbing the ladder to be a better person through dance."

Krauss can get away with sentiments that might sound naive from anyone else because he is such an anomalous figure in this role. At fifty-three, Krauss still looks like the muscular, competitive Olympic volleyball player he once was and he still moves with an easy grace reflecting his years of training on scholarships at the Martha Graham, Joffrey Ballet, Alvin Ailey, and Luigi schools.

"I'm Israeli and I'm German, so you'd better watch out!" he teases. This afternoon in the high-security B-9 unit, the wing for convicted felons, a dozen boys 13 to 17 years old turn out for Krauss's fast-paced jazz dance class. Participation is voluntary, but usually everyone, and sometimes even a probation officer, joins in.

The boys begin by clearing the floor of the room, a drab common eating area smelling of disinfectant and with a cement floor and single row of small, high windows. They shove the tables and chairs to the perimeter, then linger near the portable CD player Krauss sets up, straining to see the recordings he has brought for today's class. Most of these young men graduate to adult jail when they turn 18 to complete sentences that stretch for decades. Yet their high-spirited investment in the moment belies this. "These guys don't believe they are going to live past 20 or 25," Krauss explains. "From what they see in their communities they expect that drugs, AIDS, or someone is going to kill them before then."

Yet for this one hour, before Krauss moves on to teach the girls of the G-1 unit, the boys are eager, attentive, and fairly nimble as they scramble through his fast-paced warm-up of stretches, slides, skips, and pivoting walks. "OK, Chiquita Banana," he jokes, patting the shaven head of a sad-eyed small boy with gang symbol tattoos on the knuckles of both hands. Now they launch into an ambitious combination of full body springs over one another's prone forms. It's a physically and, in this context, socially risky move but they all dive into it without hesitation, clearing one another with inches to spare and then hopping up for the next move. It is only later that Krauss confides how challenging this action was for most of the boys because its pose suggested one man atop another sexually, a big taboo in the aggressively homophobic culture of "juvie."

Many of the boys are also members of the two leading rival gangs in San Jose, and this adds yet another layer of danger to Krauss's harmonizing ensemble moves. It's easy to think of West Side Story as one watches Krauss coax the boys to temporarily put aside their enmity and try a few dance moves together. "It's not cool to ask questions," Krauss explains to a visitor, and so he often has them count out loud when they dance so everyone knows the beat. When they miss a count he teases them. "Count! That's why you go to school, and why else do I pay taxes?" he shouts at them good-naturedly.

The boys' affection for Krauss is readily apparent. He commands respect on their terms as well as his own. Last year, when he was hospitalized with meningitis and unable to attend the annual holiday program, the boys and girls unanimously decided to run the whole show, in his honor, without him. As he moves through the labyrinthine hallways and cellblocks of Juvenile Hall, Krauss cuts an impressive figure. He's a tough guy by anyone's standards--a former Israeli Army instructor and soldier who, like many of his students, came to English as his second language. He's physically strong and fearless, working in the midst of a room where a half-dozen of his dance students this afternoon are convicted murderers.

"Most of them have nothing to live for," he says. "There are frequent suicide attempts, and once a kid got pissed off and came at me with a chair. They are holding a lot inside. Their brain is all the time in crisis," he continues. "So I always arrive with hundreds of class plans and I find out what went on the night before so I'll know what kind of state the kids will be in and what kind of class they need." Sometimes tensions run so high that Krauss jettisons a regular class and shows dance videos and talks to the kids about how good it can feel, and how beautiful it can look, to really dance fully with one's whole spirit.