Juvie Jazz.

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.

Krauss is also captivatingly cool when he starts to demonstrate for the kids. There is a panther-like quality to his actions and an ease and surprise in his gestures. He looks like a guy dancing rather than a rarefied, and for this population, out-of-reach dancer.

Born on a kibbutz in Israel in 1946 to German and Czech immigrant parents, Krauss was, by his own admission, a precocious but difficult child who was easily bored in class. He discovered movement early, first in folk dance on the kibbutz; then in sports, and finally, as a young adult, in modern dance at the Bat-Dor Company School in Tel Aviv.

After touring the U.S. and Canada in the late 1970s as part of a dance duet program with his first wife, Nurit, Krauss settled in the Bay Area to be near the Mountain View studio of his mentor, Richard Gibson. (Krauss now lives in Palo Alto a few blocks from his Zohar Dance Studio with his second wife, Daynee, and their daughter.) By 1979 the first of his outreach programs to the low-income communities of East Palo Alto, Redwood City, East Menlo Park, and San Jose was underway. Krauss says it was seeing a show of the kids from Alvin Alley's outreach program that was his first inspiration to work with this population.

Krauss's colleagues respond with equal enthusiasm and awe to his blunt manner and remarkable achievement. "It really is him!" says Bill Sommerville, executive director of Philanthropic Ventures, a Bay Area foundation that funds Krauss's work with troubled teens. "He has a commitment, a heart and soul and spirit, and those are essential. Ehud is working in what looks like an impossible situation at Juvenile Hall. These kids have nothing to lose, they've hit bottom," Sommerville said. "Ehud brings them back. It's a high compliment to the field of dance that it can be a tool with such an interesting population. Ehud has shown that maybe dancers sell themselves short. They do have something to give the community in this way and there is a huge demand for it."

Gerald Neary, the affable probation manager of Juvenile Hall, is awed by Krauss as well. "One of the things Ehud is able to work through is that facade incarcerated teens often have. These are all really just kids. You can just go in and watch his class and see dance is working to release tension and build a team with these kids in a way nothing else is."

Essentially none of the boys or girls Krauss teaches in Juvenile Hall had ever had a dance class before he started separate boys and girls classes four years ago, supported by funding from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. Yet once they start it, almost none will miss a class unless they are being disciplined in solitary confinement, or are under observation for a suicide attempt.

John G. (the names of the students have been changed to protect their identities), a 17-year-old boy, has been taking class with Krauss in San Jose Juvenile Hall for two and a half years, and he regards the class as an important crucible for his growing confidence and agreeability.

"At the beginning I didn't like Ehud too much; he didn't have patience and he was grouchy," John said in a telephone interview from Juvenile Hall. "But now I really like the dance class a lot," he continued. "It takes my mind off things and releases all my stress if I am stressed about court. In here, we don't get to jump around. Because we've got to get along with other people when we are dancing, it also helps us do that when we aren't dancing. In class you see that not everyone can learn the same and so you get to know a little about them if you help them with the steps."

Marie T. and Fran E., 15- and 16-year-olds in the Girls Unit at Juvenile Hall, credit the dance classes with giving them confidence, helping them overcome their shyness, and releasing the same kinds of stresses John describes "My confidence is the biggest surprise I've felt from Ehud's classes," Marie T. says. "He taught us how not to give up if we miss a step. I think this will help me keep my self-control so I'll get off probation this time when I'm finally out."

Fran E. concurs about the positive socializing influence of these dance classes. "There are people in here I don't like, but when I'm dancing with them I forget about it. If you keep in mind how things went with them dancing, then the differences don't seem so important."

For John G., the biggest benefit of Krauss's dance experience has been a new model for how to succeed at challenges, particularly academic ones. "In school now I don't give up as easily," he says, referring to the Osborne School within Juvenile Hall. "I'm going to take some college courses and yesterday they gave me this history book that was hard to understand. I wanted to stop, but I stuck with it and in the end I understood it," he said proudly, ascribing his success to Krauss's dance class training, in the rewards of perseverance.

"I am interested in why these kids are failing at school," Krauss says. "They are not learning English. They are always on the outside. Through the arts they can learn to succeed at something. I want to show them that dance gives them a better high than drugs." For Alicia H., a 16-year-old now at the Muriel Wright Ranch in Santa Clara, a transitional institution between juvenile jail and a return to society, Krauss's dance classes have provided a new model for getting along with adults. "He treats us like human beings," she says. "I've been in and out of jail since I was 11 and I know now that as long as I keep dancing I have the best chance of not going back to drugs or jail. When I dance I use my imagination, and for a little while I forget where I am."

Krauss's dance classes are demanding, but not intimidating. He overflows with ideas and optimism about the virtues of experience in the arts for the whole gamut of at-risk teens. In addition to his six classes a week for the inmates of Juvenile Hall, he teaches another twenty-two classes a week in youth development centers, juvenile authority ranches, and women's detention centers throughout the Bay Area. "I'd like to see many more dance teachers take two hours a week and go teach dance to these kinds of kids," Krauss says of his dream. "I'd like to teach teachers how we can do this and motivate kids. With art we can give them self-esteem, and self-esteem is the immune system of the soul. It costs $30,000 a year to keep one kid in Juvenile Hall. What if some money were spent on giving them the tools to do something else?"

Before and after class he is warm and personal with the teens, giving a quick hug to one quiet boy as he jokes with another. "You're still here?" he asks. "What, you like the food so much you don't want to leave?" Yet once the class begins the terms of success become toughness, not accessibility. Krauss keeps up a light banter throughout the warm-up, prodding the boys to stay attentive and focused on the task at hand and, most importantly, to drop the heavily coded body language of their gangs and try on the shape of the jazz phrase he is teaching them. "Don't hold your crotch," he keeps reminding four boys in the back row. "Nothing is going to fall off!"

This afternoon the forty-eight girls of G-1 prove a more recalcitrant group. Seated on the gray cement floor of their common area, they chatter softly and tug at their exercise uniform of pink T-shirts and green shorts through Krauss's opening stretches. He halts the class when one girl shouts, "God!" in exasperation. "Don't get religious on me," he jokes. Then he turns serious. "It's nothing to do with God. It's something to do with you."

Several weeks later, in late December at Juvenile Probation's Annual Foster Grandparent Holiday Appreciation Program, the dancing boys and girls of B-9 and G-1 sit nervously on a corner section of bleachers in the Juvenile Hall Gym. They all wear new black T-shirts with the words "Juvie Jazz" emblazoned across the front. On cue, they rise and first the girls, and then the boys, go through their dance routine before 400 of their peers from Juvenile Hall. For the boys in particular, self-consciousness rapidly gives way to a swaggering assurance as their bodies find the familiar rhythms and placement of Krauss's phrases.

Dance has become a substitute home for these kids. It is beginning to open them up to themselves. "I believe very hard in art," Krauss says. Watching his Juvie Jazz dancers, art indeed seems the first step toward hope.

IndepenDANCE, Krauss' dance education and performance program for at-risk youth, will perform at the annual Kidz Dancing show with Zohar School of Dance students May 25 in Palo Alto, California. Call [phone] for more information.