The Dancer Who Learned Pilates Between Two Jealous Mentors
Before opening the Beverly Hills studio, Ron Fletcher spent two decades split between two figures competing for his loyalty: Martha Graham on stage, Joseph Pilates on the mat. Neither one made it easy.
We’ve already told, in this section, how Ron Fletcher arrived in Beverly Hills and what he invented there: the Floorwork and Towelwork that freed the method from its equipment. What that story leaves out is what happened before, in New York, during the twenty years Fletcher spent trying — with more tension than is usually told — to serve two masters at once.
Two callings, one bad knee
Fletcher was born May 29, 1921, in Dogtown, a working-class neighborhood of St. Louis, Missouri, and arrived in New York with a still-vague idea of pursuing dance. What he found was concrete: a scholarship spot in Martha Graham’s company, then the absolute epicenter of American modern dance. In 1948, a knee injury sent him to Joseph Pilates’ studio at 939 Eighth Avenue. The treatment worked, and Fletcher didn’t just get better: he stayed on, first as a formal student, then as a de facto disciple for two decades.
Two figures who each competed for the loyalty of their most promising students — and Fletcher had to tread carefully between them for twenty years.
The quiet rivalry
Graham and Pilates shared more than just Fletcher: both were, by contemporary accounts, jealous of their most promising students, and neither was especially thrilled to see one of their own splitting time with the other. Fletcher remained an active dancer in Graham’s company while studying Body Contrology with Joseph and Clara, and that dual loyalty — expressive dance on one side, mechanical and anatomical control on the other — is probably the most direct explanation for why his own style, once he finally opened a studio in 1972, turned out so different from other Elders’: less tied to the equipment, closer to the vocabulary of stage movement.
A whole career before the studio
Before Beverly Hills, Fletcher had a long, visible career as a performer and choreographer: he debuted on Broadway in 1946 with Lute Song, alongside Mary Martin and Yul Brynner; choreographed Top Banana in 1951, with Phil Silvers, which ran for 350 performances; directed the Ice Capades between 1954 and 1967; and staged numbers for Tallulah Bankhead, Pearl Bailey, and Shirley Jones. Through all of those years, he kept up, in parallel and almost in secret, the Pilates training that would go on to define the second half of his life.
Why this matters today
The usual version of Fletcher’s story starts on Rodeo Drive. But the style that made that studio famous — more fluid, more expressive, deliberately different from the classical school Romana Kryzanowska guarded so jealously — wasn’t born in Los Angeles. It was born earlier, in the years a dancer in his twenties tried not to disappoint either of his two mentors at once.
Field Notes
- 1946Year of Ron Fletcher's Broadway debut, in Lute Song, alongside Mary Martin and Yul Brynner.
- 20Years Fletcher spent training and working with Joseph and Clara Pilates before opening his own studio.
- 1Studio Fletcher opened in his entire life — the one on Rodeo Drive, Beverly Hills, in 1972.