A Time to Dance: The Life of Heinz Poll

The late Heinz Poll is best known as the founder, choreographer, and artistic director of Ohio Ballet, a dance company that flourished for more than thirty years and was called a "gem" and "the best news in dance" by critics in Boston and New York. Based at the University of Akron, Ohio Ballet toured forty-four states and several countries, including Italy and Mexico, often performing some of the sixty-plus works that Heinz Poll created for his dancers.

After retirement, Heinz Poll completed his memoir, A Time to Dance. In a distinctive voice both pungent and charming, he tells the compelling story of how a teenager forced to spend the last two years of World War II in the German navy eventually wound up directing a dance company in Akron, Ohio. Following a beginning as a soloist in Germany, he had a successful career as principal dancer and choreographer with the National Ballet of Chile. In the '60s, stints as dancer and teacher in France and New York led to his unlikely position in Akron. With determination and uncompromising artistic ambition-and with the indispensable help of his partner, Thomas Skelton, a veteran Broadway lighting designer-Heinz Poll turned an eight-member student ensemble, the Ohio Chamber Ballet, into the fully professional and widely acclaimed Ohio Ballet. Through all the unexpected twists of his adventurous life, one constant is clear: Heinz Poll's total dedication to dance.