Dancer in the Park

A grand jete. Photo by Franny Schertzer

Yesterday, I took my son to the zoo. We found a park in between the giraffes and the camels and started doing our game I call "Jetes." If you have any dance training at all, you'll recognize a jete as a leap. From ballet it has been adopted by almost every other form of dance because, hey, dancers love to leap. As we play jetes, my son and I leap around going as high in the air as we can and shouting, "jete, jete" at the top of our lungs, regardless of the company we are keeping.

It is an unusual game, but it is a game that has inspired a great deal of other children (and some teenagers) to replicate us. Dance is the purest embodiment of joy in the universe. There is no barrier, no limb or appendage, no part of your consciousness between yourself and an expression of energy and exuberance when you are allowing yourself to give way to dance. And watching my son reflecting my amateur park dancing, I felt pride that my son was so uninhibited and expressive. In liberating myself from masculanization, I discovered a fulfilling emotional life, and I have given my son the chance to free himself.

Another family was nearby, and our lyrical steps soon led us into their midst. A five-year-old boy in a soccer shirt and pair of shiny sport shorts approached me to ask, "What are you doing?"

Kensington Park by Jospephson.

I answered, "We're doing jetes. It's a dance move."

From behind his gender drag, he asked me, "Can I see it again?"

So I did a couple of straight jetes and a ballet move that I enjoy a great deal called a grand allegro. Of course, I am terrible at these. At 6'4" and 185 pounds, my allegros are more floppy fish than soaring swan. Pretty soon, a passel of kids was chasing me around the little enclosure of grass, surrounded by the braying of animals at the zoo, the humphing of camels, a caw from a peahen, an occasional spurt of laughter from a distant hyena, and we were all leaping for the sky with our arms held suborbital over our heads.

Five children and myself leaped about on the grass as their dads watched, with expressions on their faces like I was turning leading their children out of Ireland with a pan-pipe of homosexual deviancy. However, it was not long before one of the dads pulled himself out of his bewilderment and did what men so often do when they are uncomfortable. He turned to violence.

He pulled aside the boy in gender drag and introduced him to a karate chop, then encouraged the boy to practice on him. The dancers in the park were soon ninjas on the attack. Even my own son, seeing that all of the other boys had been transitioned to acts of violence on one another, started to practice making Bruce Lee sounds while his joyful facial expression crumpled into the closest approximation of hate and intimidation that his chubby cheeks could muster.

The dad who had turned away from the deviant behavior of dance to the socially acceptable simulated violence was scowling himself, which is apparently the appropriate facial expression for men at play. I redirected my son and the girl back to peaceful and joyful dance, but my heart wasn't in it. The little boys knew their place. They had been successfully trained to know that "dance" involved pink tutus and girly slippers. Their momentary confusion that dance was something fun and powerful was just a lapse in judgment, promptly cured by Dad's reminder that they should be pretending to hurt one another.

I was reminded of one of the most instructive gender-training moments of my childhood. My own first ballet class ended in crying as I realized that I was the only boy. My fear of what it meant to be feminized drove me to wander the hallways with tears streaming down my face. If I was doing something that was for girls, did that mean that my friends, who refused to play with girls, wouldn't play with me anymore? What about all the finery that I saw on the dance floor? The tutus and leotards that I didn't own only served to show me how foreign ballet was from the life for which I was being trained. 10 years later, I started taking ballet again, this time in the early stages of a teenage rebellion that would form my belief in the necessity of men's liberation.

Virtual image by Jie Loon.

Still, for a brief moment, on the plain between the giraffes and the camels at the Denver Zoo, I was able to imagine a world where small boys were not introduced to violence as a matter of course. In this world, it is acceptable and encouraged for boys to spend their afternoons learning about jetes and grand allegros. In the world to come, perhaps even my future grandson's generation, the default game of choice with a dad will not be pretend to beat each other up, but express yourself through clumsy, but powerful, leaps.