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Ohio Ballet co-founder Heinz Poll shares candid, humorous tales in memoir
By Elaine Guregian
Beacon Journal arts and culture critic
Published on Sunday, May 04, 2008
Poll discovered talents as an ice skater that led him to a lifetime career in dance. His path from Oberhausen, Germany, carried him through wartime duty in Nazi Germany and a dance career in Europe and South America. Eventually, Poll ended up in Akron, co-founding a contemporary ballet company called Ohio Ballet with his life partner, Broadway lighting designer Tom Skelton.
After retiring from Ohio Ballet in 1999, Poll turned his energy toward writing a memoir. Barbara Schubert, who helped Ohio Ballet get off the ground and served it in administrative capacities (including associate director) for nearly 20 years, was his editor. In retirement, Poll lived in a small house at the back of Barbara and John Schubert's property in Cleveland Heights. Going back and forth between the houses, Poll and Schubert relived his memories as they created the book, A Time to Dance: The Life of Heinz Poll, just published by the University of Akron Press.
Poll's deadpan sense of humor makes the early chapters of his story a great read. The uncle who played pranks with his glass eye, no less than the stink and hunger of war, are recounted with honesty and verve.
Poll, who died in 2006, and Skelton, who died in 1994, were discreet about their relationship as a couple. But in this story, Poll's sexuality is part of the story, beginning on page 2 with him recounting the role of a lamppost in his sexual awakening.
It's a little startling, but if you knew Poll at all, you knew he was always one to cut to the chase. In interviews, he never delivered an elaborate backstory about his new choreography.
New York Times dance critic Jennifer Dunning writes in her illuminating foreword that Poll once told her, ''An arabesque can have many textures. It can make the world stand still or make it tremble. And things have to make sense. You are not just writing lines to read between.''
So many choreographers are willing to string a bunch of interesting gestures together and let the audience sort them out. At his best, Poll's original choreography for the Ohio Ballet was wonderfully specific, just like his conversation.
Often Poll's memories are humorous, with unexpected timing. What he remembers most vividly from the day Adolf Hitler was supposed to come speak to Hitler Youth was the painful lack of toilet facilities as the day dragged on.
Poll makes you feel the uncertainty of his travels by train, often alone and in treacherous circumstances. He writes gratefully of the people who seemed to appear out of the woodwork to help him. He makes your mouth water at his descriptions of the simple foods that sustained him.
Tenacity formed this would-be performer.
Despite what sounds like a total lack of encouragement from his parents, Poll forged a dance career that took him from professional companies in Germany to Chile to Paris.
In typically candid style, he is blunt about the reasons he began commuting from New York City to teach in Akron: it was close, and he needed the money.
It was Cuyahoga Falls ballet teacher Nan Klinger who discovered Poll teaching at the National Academy of Ballet in New York. She invited him to guest-teach in Akron for a week in September 1966. After that, Poll returned, developed contacts and gradually extended his time teaching in Akron.
Eventually, with eight teenage dancers, Poll had the genesis of the Ohio Ballet, which he founded with Skelton in 1968.
Poll writes of his ideological differences with the University of Akron, and of friendships that went awry as he settled into teaching and running a company in residence at the university. So many years later, it's hard to sort it all out, and few would be interested in the results.
What would have made enticing reading is stories about the dancers. What made Poll choose each one, and how did they surprise him? Barbara Schubert said in an interview that Poll closed down when it came to discussions of these dancers.
Ohio Ballet toured 42 states and several countries, but frank stories of life on the road — or any stories — are conspicuously missing. Fewer than five pages are devoted to the topic Ohio Ballet's Golden Years in addition to six titled Ohio Ballet's Breakthrough.
In the book, Poll thanks his loyal audiences. But it's disappointing that Ohio Ballet's leader for 31 years didn't have any more personal insights to share about a group that, for a time, put Akron on the dance world's map.
Elaine Guregian can be reached at 330-996-3574 or eguregian@thebeaconjournal.com
Get the full article here.
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