dt                   PORTRAITS - JOSEPHINE SCHWARZ                   09/14/97 ================================================================================                              DAYTON DAILY NEWS                   Copyright (c) 1997, Dayton Newspapers Inc.DATE: Sunday, September 14, 1997            TAG: 9709210271EDITION: CITY          SECTION: ENTERTAINMENT PAGE: 1C TYPE: PROFILE SOURCE: By Terry Morris DAYTON DAILY NEWS                         PORTRAITS - JOSEPHINE SCHWARZ    Nineteen-year-old Josephine Schwarz sat placidly for the photographer wholived across Riverview Terrace, just as she and members of her family had donemany times before.   Like the woman behind the camera, the Schwarzes believed in art. No, theywere passionate about it. Josephine taught ballet in the dining room, theirmother had four pottery kilns in the basement, their aunt played the piano anda sculptor named Nicodemus was renting the back-yard wash house as his studio.   Art flowed back and forth on their street in the late 1920s like the waterin the nearby Great Miami River.   As she posed, her mind leaped to fantastic notions about where her likenessmight eventually travel and who might view it. Many of Jane Reece'sphotographs were `really quite nice,' she knew. Some ended up being sent allover the world.   `What if a Chinese prince fell in love with my picture and came pursuing meclear to Dayton?' Josephine wrote that night in her diary. `Or maybe a highnobleman of Norway will think me a lovely person fit to be the wife of such ahigh and mighty man and will send all kinds of envoys over. If I refused themall until finally he himself came with a small army and carried me away withmy hair flowing out in the wind and my face white against the dark red of hisroyal jacket, why, the whole U.S. could go to war on account of me.'   Eleven years later, that dreamer on Riverview and her older sister Hermenewould establish what is now the the second oldest regional ballet company inthe United States.   The Dayton Ballet is embarking on its 60th year. Only the Atlanta Ballet isolder.   `When she started there were people in different parts of the country doingthe same thing at about the same time,' said Jon Rodriguez, who came to thethen Dayton Civic Ballet in the early 1960s to replace Stuart Sebastian in aballet and ended up staying, later becoming a co-director of the company.   `Before her, there was only Dorothy Alexander in Atlanta. After her cameBarbara Weisberger in Philadelphia, the Christensen brothers in San Franciscoand Virginia Williams in Boston. Compared to those places, Dayton was a hicktown. What she accomplished here was unheard of. It still is.'   Miss Jo, as she is known even by residents of the retirement community inBoulder, Colo., where she now looks out her window at a view of RockyMountains, is moving toward her 90th birthday. She was born April 8, 1908, inDayton as the fourth of five children of Hannah Lindeman and Joseph Schwarz.   Josephine remembers living in a house at 133 Holt St. in Dayton, whereanother 7-year-old named Virginia Weiffenbach (the future Virginia Kettering)let her ride her tricycle. That was also where Jo came down with the mumps atage 7, which led to a prolonged infection and fever that kept her bedriddenfor eight months and left her deaf in her right ear.   "When I was in high school, people thought I was standoffish and a snob.They would pass me in the hall and say, `Hi, Jo.' I never heard them,' shesaid during a 1995 interview at her home in Boulder. `When I slow-danced witha man and his head was on this side, there were times, I'm sure, whenwonderful things were whispered in that ear. I never heard them.'   If she had never gotten sick, though, the Dayton Ballet might never havebeen born.   After she recovered, she was weak and listless. Her doctor recommendedexercise. Her mother, enrolled her at Bott's Dancing Academy downtown, whereJo's Aunt Claudia was an accompanist.   She loved it. When her father's downtown clothing store went bankruptduring her freshman year at Steele High School, she had to give up her privatemusic and drama lessons. But she refused to relinquish her $1-a-week Saturdayballet lesson at Bott's with Miss Kirkoff, who traveled up from Cincinnati toteach. With her mother's encouragement, she offered to teach dance in her hometo younger neighborhood children for 10 cents a lesson. Ten of them earned herthe weekly dollar she needed.   Her father moved the furniture out of the dining room and installed aballet barre on the wall. Her brother Gus, who now lives near Jackson Hole,Wyo., and turned 82 in August, recalls mopping the studio floor every day `tokeep the dust down. And I had to fill in whenever they needed a man to be apartner. When I was growing up, the dance business was part of the family andone of my chores.'   Four years after that first class, which was 70 years ago, Miss Jo and MissHermene hung out a sign for the Schwarz School. The Dayton Ballet School isdirectly descended.   The dance company was founded a decade later after Miss Jo was forced togive up her flickering hopes of a performing career.   While teaching at a girls' summer camp in 1937, she gave a performanceoutside on a clay tennis court, because the only stage available was tiny andconcrete.   Her knee `went out' as she landed from a jump and it would never be rightagain, not even after three operations over the next 20 years. She danced onit again in Dayton, with her early dance groups and occasionally as a soloist.The June 30, 1941, issue of  Newsweek included a photograph of her leadingeight young women in bare feet and long, flowing skirts in a dance across thegrass in Dayton. But even that eventually proved impossible.   If she hadn't injured that knee, however, the Dayton Ballet might neverhave sprung to life. The Schwarz School probably would have gone on as before,with Hermene taking over when Jo went to New York for extended periods tostudy and perform.   First she studied at the the School of American Ballet. She also studiedwith American modern dance founders Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman, taughtsome of Humphrey's classes when the Humphrey-Weidman company was on tour,danced in musical revues directed by Albertina Rasch, and in the Broadway showLife Begins at 8:40 , which starred Milton Berle.   The family account was that Hermene had `backed into the dance business'because she always had to chaperone Jo, starting in high school when thetalented younger sister went to Chicago to study with Anna Pavlova's partner,Adolph Bolm, and to dance in the Ravinia Ballet there. Hermene ended up takingclasses, too.   The sisters went to Europe to study with German modern dance pioneer MaryWigman and at the Von Laban School in 1929 and '30. Hermene, who lived withher sister for years and was a gifted photographer and costume designer, diedin 1986 at the age of 84.   The dance company's original name was the Experimental Group for YoungDancers.   In July 1938 she wrote in her journal: `I have forced into existence TheExperimental Group for Young Dancers. It has been hard driving and nerveexhausting work fitted into the usual press of spring recital business. But Ifeel it will mean so very much to the school and to me if I can swing it. Andof course the opportunity it affords to the girls is very great.'   The name was later changed to the Dayton Theater Dance Group, the DaytonCivic Ballet and, finally, the fully professional Dayton Ballet.   Miss Jo was a stern and organized taskmaster, particularly after she beganto concentrate on the company while delegating more details of the school.   `There was no talking, no laughing and no chewing gum. It was boot camp,'says Bess Imber, who studied with Miss Jo as a girl, danced in her company asa young woman, co-directed under her supervision, `but never felt that I trulypleased her`I always thought she wanted me to be more like her, but Icouldn't. She had to mold me. She once told me she felt like a sculptor andknew exactly where to strike to create a dancer. And it worked. You became sowild that you did those 32 fouettes. You did hold your leg up there for the 16counts.   Joyce Wolfe of Dayton, 67, began studying at the Schwarz School in 1947,danced with the Dayton Theatre Dance Group for more than a decade and taughtin the school.   One summer she and company member Patricia Heigel, now a college danceprofessor in Pennsylvania, enrolled in a class with Martha Graham with morethan 110 others.   Martha gave them all an impossible combination to do from one side of thegym to the other and `the kids started dropping like flies,' Wolfe recalls.`Martha started ordering dancers out, one by one. She'd say, `Out, out, out. Idon't want to look at you.' On the second day, only 68 students returned. Bythe end of the week, there were only about 40 of us. Pat and I made it. Shewas wicked, but she tolerated us. I'm convinced it was because of Jo andHermene. They had trained us well. We were Schwarz dancers and proud of it.'   When Miss Jo got off work and came home, `the intellectual electricity inthe house always rose several layers. You could feel it,' her nephew, PeterSchwarz of Denver says, thinking back to the days after the family moved fromRiverview to a house at 1232 Amherst Place in Dayton.   Jo always followed the same down-time ritual. `She would have a bowl ofpotato chips, a glass of sherry and a cigarette,' he says.   She had her chances at romance, but never put love before her career.   She had a high school crush on Paul Katz, who at 17 was already the firstviolinist in the Cincinnati Symphony and later founded the Dayton Philharmonicin 1933.   Then there was a poet in her life and a doctor on the East Coast. Shedidn't believe she would have made a very good doctor's wife and she wasprobably right. In a 1933 letter to her, her young doctor admitted, `Yourdevotion to your work would irritate me.'   She hopes to return home for a visit sometime during this anniversaryseason of the Dayton Ballet, perhaps for a showing of a biographicaldocumentary local filmmaker Patrick O'Donnell is working on.   `But the trip back home is very exhausting for me now. It takes a lot ofadvance planning,' she says. `And I can't travel by myself.'   She complains that her memory has become faulty, yet the past remains sharpfor her. Her mobility is also limited, due to rheumatoid arthritis and thatknee. But she remains committed to dance. She has lectured for the residentsof her community on `How to look at the dance.' A few weeks ago she went toDenver to watch Dayton Ballet product Rebecca Wright teach a class. Anotherformer Dayton Ballet dancer, Surrie Hobart, visited her two weeks ago while inBoulder doing research at the University of Colorado.   Meanwhile, what she started in Dayton still grows from those now very deeproots of six and seven decades ago.   In 1924 at age 16, she already knew she was going to have to do it her way.She wrote this:   `I feel so young and inexperienced. I have perfect qualms when I think ofgiving kids new dances or putting someone on their toes or even advancing someof them to a higher class. If I was only sure of myself or had someone overme, but no, it's all up to me. 'LENGTH:  182 linesILLUSTRATION: PHOTOS: (2):          (#1) Josephine Schwarz          (#2) Josephine Schwarz, 89, taught dance for 10 cents a lesson in          her family's dining room when she was a freshman in high school.          CREDIT: GARY GRAFF/DAYTON DAILY NEWSCATEG: ENTERTAINMENT & THE PERFORMING ARTS SUBJ: DANCE NA: JOSEPHINE SCHWARZ MEMO: CONTACT Terry Morris at 225-2377; or e-mail him/her at      firstname_lastname@coxohio.comENHANCER: ref1================================================================================ 2 of 32, 26 Terms                                                              Transfer complete. 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