DAYTON DAILY NEWS                   Copyright (c) 1993, Dayton Newspapers Inc.DATE: Sunday, April 18, 1993                 TAG: 9304190176EDITION: CITY           SECTION: LIFESTYLE   PAGE: 1C SOURCE: By Terry Morris DAYTON DAILY NEWS                              REMARKABLE, BY JO     JOSEPHINE SCHWARZ TO BE HONORED FOR LIFETIME OF DANCE ACHIEVEMENTS    Her name is Miss Jo, two simple words that say Your Honor, Your Highness, Your Excellency.   Miss Jo is what dancers, friends, acquaintances and people who have only heard of her call her.   Her life story is not one of accepting setbacks. It's one of enduring achievements.   Fifty-five years ago she co-founded the dance company that became the Dayton Ballet. Outside New York and San Francisco in this country, only the Atlanta Ballet is older.   At 85, slowed by arthritis and no longer officially connected with the Dayton Ballet except in an advisory and honorary capacity, she's still starting things in the dance community.   Her latest project, established with a $50,000 chunk of her life savings, is a Dayton Dancers Fund to supplement performers' salaries.   "I'll probably live maybe until I'm 90, but why wait until I die? The dancers need it now," she says.   The Dayton Ballet will celebrate its birthday this week with a series of performances dedicated to the woman who has been just about everything to the company in its history.   Josephine Lindeman Schwarz, her name at birth on April 8, 1908, wouldn't exist if not for a match made in Germany 150 years ago.   The woman who would become her Grandmother Babette had a younger and prettier sister named Marguerite who was in love and wanted to get married.   "In those days, a girl couldn't marry if she had an older sister who was still single. Babette was very big and had no prospects, but she loved Marguerite and wanted her to be happy. So she agreed to see a matchmaker."   She was matched with a man named Jacob Schwarz. They married and moved to America.   "Doctors said Babette would never be able to have children, but somehow shehad four boys and two girls."   One of them was Joseph Schwarz, who moved to Dayton from Columbus in the late 1800s. He married Hannah Lindeman, whose family had come from Cincinnati and once operated a restaurant in part of what is now the Victoria Theatre.   Their first child was Hermene, born in 1902; their fourth was Josephine, in1908. Another girl, Babette, who had been named for her grandmother, died of spinal meningitis at 2 1/2 when Josephine was 16 months old.   Josephine was sent to stay with her Lindeman grandparents for a while. Theylived on Holt Street off Salem Avenue, across from a family named Weiffenbach that had a little girl named Virginia. She grew up to be a philanthropist whose gifts have changed the face of Dayton.   "We all know her as Virginia Kettering now," Miss Jo says. "I think I rode her tricycle a few times, but I was very little. Hermene played with her more than I did."   When Josephine was 8, she came down with a case of the mumps that wouldn't go away.   "I was in bed with a fever and ear infection for eight months and I've had no hearing in my left ear since then. But I didn't let many people know that for many years."   When she was finally well, she was sent to dance class to help her rebuild her strength and regain her sense of balance.   The therapy had become a passion by the time she was 14, when her father's Dayton haberdashery (Schwarz and Frye) went bankrupt.   "I had to give up my music lessons, my drama classes and my dancing, but I couldn't give up my dancing. I just couldn't."   To raise money to pay for her lessons, she started teaching dance to children in her Dayton View neighborhood.   Meanwhile, she dreamed of being a ballerina.   While a student at Steele High School in Dayton, she and Hermene studied during summers and vacations with the famed Russian ballet teacher Adolph Bolmin Chicago and also danced there in Ruth Page's Ravinia Opera Ballet.   "Mr. Bolm took me, but practically everyone else said I would never make itin ballet. I was so tall and had such long feet that when I was on pointe I was about 5-10 1/2. Ballerinas in America then weren't what they are now. Theywere blond, small, filled out and had rosy cheeks. I was tall, dark, thin and I wasn't bosomy. So I became a modern dancer, but I never lost my love for ballet."   She had wanted to quit school and dance full time, but her mother made her graduate. "To this day, nobody has ever asked me for my diploma," she says.   In 1927, she and Hermene co-founded the Schwarz School of Dance in their home. (What they started continues 65 years and thousands of students later asthe Dayton Ballet School.)   In 1928, she saw a Chicago performance by German modern dancers Yvonne Georgi and Harald Kreutzberg that made her cry.   "I had never cried at a dance performance before. It was so beautiful."   Off she and Hermene went to Germany and Austria in the summers of 1929 and '30, studying with German Expressionist pioneer Mary Wigman and her disciples.Later they studied in New York with Charles Weidmann and Doris Humphrey, American modern dance trailblazers.   "I loved modern dance because it was so free; you could do anything. But I never lost my love for ballet."   Enrollment at the Schwarz School dwindled during the Depression from more than 100 to only 30. Miss Jo couldn't stand it.   "In 1934, I left the school in my sister's hands, took my $70 savings out of the bank and went off to New York."   An advertisement for George Balanchine's new School of American Ballet is what prompted her to go.   "I had only had Russian ballet to that point and I thought, 'Hmmmm, American ballet. That's exactly what I need.' But when I enrolled there, oh boy, I discovered that everybody talked Russian. Even the pianist was Russian.Mr. Balanchine could say, 'One, two, three, four' in English, but that was about all. Lincoln Kirstein (a founder of the School of American Ballet and the New York City Ballet) was the only one who was American, and he wouldn't talk."   She soon returned to studying with Weidmann and within a few months was thefeatured dancer in a Broadway revue called Life Begins at 8:40 , starring Milton Berle. Her social life was a whirlwind.   "Times were hard, but Broadway was rife with activity. I was in my 20s and very popular. I was dating every other night. It was hard to give all of that up when I had to come back in 1937. That was when my knee went out for the first time."   She would never again be able to dance full out on her left leg, but beforethe year ended she and Hermene had co-founded the dance company that eventually would become the Dayton Ballet.   The sisters had no model for starting a ballet company in a location far from the world's cultural capitals - "little old boondocks Dayton," is how Miss Jo still puts it. They invented their own.   The foundation was the school they had started in their home at 823 Riverview Ave. 10 years earlier.   "Hermene kept it going while I was away and supplemented her income by teaching at the city recreation centers in East and West Dayton. She taught dance and exercise, painting, leather tooling, book binding. She could teach people to do anything. She was a wonderful teacher."   The Experimental Group for Young Dancers, as the company was originally known, wasn't born in a romantic swirl of pink fabric and pointe shoes.   The Schwarz sisters trained their dancers in both ballet and modern dance, which is the norm now but was unheard of in the 1920s and '30s. Ballet and modern dance were considered anathema for one another then.   The all-female troupe gave its first performance in May 1938. All five works on the program were by Miss Jo, who over the first 30 years did most of the teaching, almost all of the choreography and handled the business and administration. With almost 80 works to her credit, she remains by far the most prolific dance-maker in Dayton history.   Miss Hermene designed all of the costumes and scenery, "and she served as my editor when I choreographed," says Miss Jo.   Miss Jo danced with the group for many years, in between injuries and threeoperations on her left knee.   "Want to see?" she asks, displaying a knee crisscrossed on both sides by large, sinuous X's. (She had a hip replaced in 1986, but has refused a similaroperation on the knee. "I prefer to use a cane. I'm still walking, although the stairs are not good for me anymore.")   Under its new name of the Dayton Theater Dance Group, the company's first performance in 1941 was a notable one. Miss Jo choreographed dances to 18 songs by Stephen Foster, which were sung live by a black choir from Dayton's Linden Center under the direction of Charles Higgins.   The unprecedented collaboration made news in the New York Herald Tribune , the Pittsburgh Press and other newspapers. The Wall Street Journal printed a photograph of the dancers.   Miss Jo made a brief return to New York in 1946 to perform a program of herown interpretive dances to poetry and music, "but I had to get back to my people."   Her "people" were her relatives and her extended family of dancers.   She never married or had children, and sometimes she regrets that.   "I wanted so much to have a family. I had my chances. I had my romances." One of those she dated was Dayton Philharmonic Orchestra founder Paul Katz, who is no longer living.   She turned down two marriage proposals while living in New York.   "One young man wanted to go off to California and get into the movies. I couldn't see myself out there.   "A Jewish boy wanted to marry me so badly, and we had grown very close. Buthis family was Orthodox, which meant I would have to keep a kosher kitchen. Healso wanted to have a family of at least six. I couldn't see myself having sixbabies in eight years. What kind of dancer would I have been then? It was justtoo much."   Miss Jo, who is Jewish, says she has never encountered any anti-Semitism inDayton. "I've been lucky that way, but there was a good deal of prejudice against dancers in the early days. When I traveled alone, I learned to just say I was a teacher. If I said I was a dancer or dance teacher, some people thought that meant I was a prostitute."   If there was a man who got away, it was her Steele High School classmate, Jay Leida.   "Jay was the first boy I ever went out with, and he taught me more about how to look at photography, listen to music and look at movies than anyone. I should have married him. With my curiosity and his knowledge, it would have been a great match."   But Leida went off to live in New York.   "It was quite a shock a few years later when he came back to visit with hiswife." She was a dancer, too.   "Either my dancing, my own family, the school or my choreography just meanttoo much to me at the time, I guess. There was always something."   In the years before and after she turned the Dayton Ballet over to one of her former students, Stuart Sebastian, in 1980, she cared diligently for her sister. Hermene died in 1986.   In recent years, one of Miss Jo's main projects has been helping to organize the files, ledgers, scrapbooks, photographs, correspondence and otheritems covering the more than five decades of the Dayton Ballet and the more than six decades of its school. The collection is housed at Wright State University's Paul Laurence Dunbar Library, where it's available for public inspection.   Other treasures remain at her apartment in the Dayton Towers, where her mother's artwork and photographs of several generations of Schwarzes and Lindemans is proudly displayed.   Alongside an autographed shot of Doris Humphrey with Charles Weidmann in one of the bedrooms hangs a dramatic closeup of the dancer Jose Limon, his face beaded in sweat. He was born the same year as Miss Jo, 1908, but died 21 years ago. She remains a living link with dance history.   Dancers she tutored went on to star with the New York City Ballet, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre, the Joffrey Ballet and other companies. Some - like Sebastian, Jeraldyne Blunden and Daniel Duell - became artistic directors. Others continue to develop the dancers of the future with principles they learned from her.   Dayton native Rebecca Wright, who soared from the Dayton Ballet to prominence with the Joffrey Ballet and American Ballet Theatre, says there aremany things from her early training she "will carry with me until I die. One of the things that was so incredible about both her and Miss Hermene was theirsense of commitment and integrity. Another was Miss Jo's powerful sense of theatrical expression."   Daniel Duell, artistic director of Ballet Chicago and a longtime principal dancer with the New York City Ballet, began his training with Miss Jo and first performed with the Dayton Ballet.   "She imparted a sense of the proper way to approach this very difficult artform with dignity and integrity. She taught us the importance of painstaking effort for something as marvelous as dancing," he said. "Since I've had my owncompany, I've come to appreciate some of the tougher things she had to do, such as not avoiding assessments of people's talents. I'm very grateful for the opportunities I had in Dayton."   Suzanne Walker, who is now on the dance faculty at Wright State University after a career on Broadway, says Miss Jo "gave me not just one career, but several.   "I've been a performer, a teacher, a director and a choreographer, and it all comes from her. She was demanding, diligent and very strict with her students, which kept me humble and made me tough for life. She also loved us. She passed that on to us through her respect for the art."   Miss Jo still keeps an eye on the dancers by attending most area performances, and she still knows what makes them tick. That hasn't changed.   As she wrote 20 years ago to a mother who wondered whether her daughter should plunge into training for a career and was ready to do whatever Miss Jo said:   "In all good faith, I say, if Mary wants to be a dancer badly enough she will be, no matter what I advise or you decide. The inner drive of an artist is far stronger than advice of a teacher or decision of a parent."