The Elders: A Method Without a Will

Let’s start with the fact that tends to surprise people most: of everyone who passed through Joseph and Clara Pilates’ studio at 939 Eighth Avenue, only two ever held a document, signed by him, formally stating they were authorized to teach the method. They were Kathy Grant and Lolita San Miguel, certified on February 2, 1967, through a program administered by the State University of New York (SUNY). Joseph Pilates died eight months later. Every other name grouped today under the label “the Elders” — the first-generation teachers, the ones who studied with him in person — did so without that paperwork. They learned through accumulated hours, through closeness, through having often been his own patients.

That doesn’t make them any less legitimate. It simply makes them heirs to an oral tradition, from a time when “certification” wasn’t yet a word that mattered to anyone.

Five Lives, Five Ways of Understanding the Same Method

Romana Kryzanowska (1923–2013) arrived at the studio as a patient, not a disciple: an ankle injury while studying ballet under George Balanchine sent her, at sixteen, to Joseph Pilates. She stayed. After Joseph died in 1967, his widow Clara kept running the studio for a few more years; in 1970, Romana became director of what was by then called The Pilates Studio. She became the guardian of what’s now known as Classical Pilates: the exact order, the exact vocabulary, the repertoire as she remembered learning it.

Kathy Grant (1921–2010) — one of the two with a signed certificate — arrived seeking treatment for a foot and knee injury in the mid-1950s. She was a double pioneer: a Black woman in a field then overwhelmingly white, and a faculty member for decades at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, where she held a teaching position from 1988 until the end of her career. Her more exploratory, less dogmatic approach still feeds much of what’s grouped today under the label Contemporary Pilates.

Ron Fletcher (1921–2011) came from dance — he danced with the Martha Graham company — and trained with the Pilateses on and off between 1948 and 1968, a year after Joseph’s death. He moved his studio to Los Angeles and added his own vocabulary to the method, including a twisted-towel exercise that still carries his name.

Eve Gentry (1909–1994), a dancer with the Hanya Holm company, arrived with back and knee pain and ended up working alongside Joseph Pilates from 1942 until his death in 1967. In 1955 she survived a radical mastectomy that removed her pectoral muscle; with Pilates’ help, she returned to advanced work within about a year. That experience is where her interest in micro-movement and preparatory work for bodies that couldn’t start where everyone else started came from — a direct seed of what’s now the method’s rehabilitative branch. In 1968 she moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, and opened her own studio with the equipment Pilates had given her.

Carola Trier, a German dancer and contortionist who fled Nazi-occupied Europe, began studying with Pilates around 1950. She was, by most accounts, the first student he authorized to open her own studio — she did, in New York, in 1960 — seven years before Joseph died. That detail is worth underlining: the method’s dispersal didn’t start after his death. It started while he was alive, with his own consent.

How a Handful of Biographies Became a Divided Industry

When Joseph Pilates died in 1967, he left behind no organization to succeed the studio, no exam to decide who could teach in his name, and — as we cover elsewhere in this section — no legal protection over the word that defined the method; that battle, and its resolution, would come three decades later. What he left was a small group of people who had watched him work, each from a different body and a different need — a dancer’s ankle, a dancer’s knee, a removed breast, a contortionist’s back — and who, in teaching what they’d learned, inevitably taught their own interpretation of it too.

That’s the root of the divide that still structures most training in the field today: on one side, Classical Pilates, faithful to the order Romana defended; on the other, Contemporary Pilates, the label under which Fletcher’s, Grant’s, Gentry’s, Trier’s and countless other variations coexist. There was no formal break, no schism, no date on which the lineage split in two. There was, simply, a man who taught a handful of people without ever writing a manual of succession — and those people, over time, each became the origin point of their own school.

Lolita San Miguel, the other holder of that 1967 certificate, is still alive: she’s the last Elder standing today, and living proof that all of this happened just two generations ago.