Stanford’s Janice Ross to speak on dance class in prison

Many of the young offenders are outstanding dancers, putting them on equal footing with the Stanford students when learning dance steps together.

Learning and teaching dance in juvenile hall provides Stanford students the ability to physically engage with incarceration in America, and is part of broader public service goals of the university.

In juvenile hall, the inmates are required to walk single file, with their hands clasped behind their backs. There are practical reasons for this posture – it makes them less able to make any sudden action. But it is also part of the performance going on in prison all the time, says Stanford drama Professor Janice Ross.

Ross will give the Miriam and Peter E. Haas Centennial Professorship Lecture on Public Service about the class and its role in the bigger picture of public service at Stanford at 5:15 p.m. Wednesday, May 19, in Paul Brest Hall at the Munger Graduate Residence.

Two students who have taken the class, sophomore Xandra Clark and junior Mariam Nek, will join Ross for the talk, as will co-instructor Christa Gannon. Gannon is a Stanford Law School graduate and founder of Fresh Lifelines for Youth (FLY), which provides mentors and leadership training to at-risk youth. Ross recruited Gannon to address questions that the students had about the legal system.

For eight of the past 11 years, Ross has taught Dance 197, Dance in Prisons: The Arts, Juvenile Justice and Rehabilitation in America, which brings Stanford students to Santa Clara County Juvenile Hall or the nearby high school for juvenile offenders to learn and teach dances ranging from salsa to hip-hop.

Dance provides an unusual opportunity for the students to engage with incarcerated youth, Ross said. Rather than language, movement is the medium of exchange. "A lot of the youth inside are fabulous dancers, so a lot of the experience doesn’t reside only with the students," she said. "It is a much more egalitarian currency to use."

The weekly excursion to juvenile hall is only part of the course, where the students explore the broader issues of incarceration in America through reflection and context building. Topics in the course range from case studies of juvenile law to the cost of prisons, to the way prisons are presented in popular culture. Ross also invites exemplary artists in the prison art movement to guest lecture in the course.

The United States has 2.3 million people in prison, and 95,000 youth in juvenile halls – the largest population of incarcerated people in the world, Ross said. "Once I started the course, I realized I had perched my little class on the tip of the iceberg," she said.

The Stanford students enhance an existing year-round dance program that local jazz instructor Ehud Krauss has taught in prisons for 20 years. The presence of the Stanford students appears to have a positive affect on the incarcerated youths. Officers have told Ross that during the weeks of the program, there are fewer behavioral issues at the juvenile facility – punishment for misbehaving is not being able to participate in dance class that week. Classes are held in the center of the building, and youth who cannot participate watch from their cells.

For many of the Stanford students who have participated in the course, the impact on their lives has been dramatic. "For a lot of students it has changed the work that they do," said Ross. A few of the students have gone on to work with FLY or have continued teaching dance at the prisons with Krauss. Others have decided to pursue careers in law.

The course is expensive to run, which is why it isn’t being taught this year. Each student that takes the course has to be granted a security clearance by the state, which costs $60 per person. Ross also rents the Haas Center vans and pays for the gas to drive to and from the prison each week. The Haas Center has provided grants in the past to pay for course expenses.

The logistics of working with a juvenile hall are also challenging. Ross said that every quarter there is at least one day when something goes wrong and the class can’t be taught. Any time there is a suicide attempt or a fight somewhere in the hall, the facility’s administration "holds all movement" and no one is allowed in or out of the building.

But to Ross the logistics and challenges are more than worth it for the learning experience that it provides the students. "The experience is really visceral – there’s an institutional smell to the space, and a clang of metal doors as you go in there," she said.