Still vibrant and opinionated at 90, this first-generation teacher opens up about his experiences with Joe and Clara, his career and what he’s learned in 60 years of Pilates.
Pilates Style was recently fortunate enough to catch up with Ron Fletcher. And when you’re talking about Ron Fletcher, the term “catch up” is both figurative and literal: Fletcher, now 90, still walks the talk, upright and proud.
Of Irish and Native American descent, Fletcher moved from tiny Dogtown, Missouri, to New York City in 1944, where he took a job in the advertising department at Saks Fifth Avenue. But after attending a performance of the Martha Graham Dance Company, he decided that dance, not fashion, was his future. He convinced Graham to take him on as a student, despite the fact that he was a beginner. A natural, Fletcher went on to dance in her company, as well as on Broadway and the London stage, before going on to a successful career as a choreographer. A knee injury in 1949 led to a serendipitous meeting with Joseph and Clara Pilates, an encounter that would change his life.
Fletcher opened his first Pilates studio in Los Angeles in 1971. He later created a teacher-training program, the Ron Fletcher Program of Study, and is the inventor of Towelwork, Floorwork, Barrework and the Percussive Breath Technique.
One of only five first-generation teachers still among us, Fletcher, who now lives on a ranch in Stonewall, TX, talked to us about his life and work and a few of the things he’s learned in the past 90 years.
1. Trust Your Gut.
It was 1949 and I was doing four shows a day with Martha Graham at Radio City Music Hall when I injured my knee. Fellow dancer Allegra Kent advised me to see a little man on Eighth Avenue called Joe Pilates. I made an appointment, but Martha was furious. She didn’t want me to see him. But I was determined to see if he could help me, even though Martha called him “that man with those ugly old straps and strings.”
When I first walked into his studio, I was spooked. It looked like a medieval torture chamber. Joe made me sit on the edge of the Reformer and asked me to roll back and touch each vertebra down, one at a time. I was able to put the first few down, and then he said, “Are you straight?” He wasn’t asking if I was gay—he wanted to know if I was in a straight line. I couldn’t roll down straight because my body was compensating. He lifted me up and set me back down. I could feel the difference. That’s what sold me on Body Contrology [as Joe called his method]. I don’t think I would have stayed if it weren’t for that. He said, “You don’t need that crazy lady, Graham.” She said, “Don’t go to that distasteful place.” He’d take the credit over her; she’d take the credit over him. I trusted my instinct, and what I learned from both of them was priceless.
2. Learn to teach.
I learned how to teach from watching and listening to others. I learned that if it doesn’t work one way, tell it another. When Martha Graham told me I was going to teach a beginning class, I wanted to run. But there was no getting away from this lady. She insisted I knew what to do. She said, “You tell them what you’re going to tell them, then you tell them, then you tell them what you just told them. Then you start the process over.”
In other words, it takes patience. You’ve got to do it over and over. You say, ‘I’m going to have you turn your head,’ then I’d show them. Then I’d tell them again and then I’d show them again. That sounds ridiculous, but it’s amazing how effective it is. When you’re teaching, realize that it takes some people three times, while it takes others 28 times. Some won’t get it at all. It takes a tremendous amount of patience, knowledge and awareness to communicate what you know.
3. Know what you know.
With saved and borrowed money, I opened my first studio in Los Angeles in 1971. I was the first person to bring Pilates to L.A. But when it opened, I thought, Oh my god, what have I done? I didn’t know anything about business. Thankfully people just came, celebrities like Ali MacGraw, Barbra Streisand and Candice Bergen, who turned out to be wonderful PR (public relations) people.
I will take credit for the creative part of my work because I am a creative person. I had the sense to nurture it, use it and take a chance. But I didn’t know how to expand a business. It’s important to find people who know how. Since 2003, Kyria Sabin has been the director of Fletcher International. She has a sense of marketing and PR and is a smart businesswoman. We both decided that the intention of the company would be to enable people to learn to teach the Fletcher method. We wanted to be disseminators of the work for people who wanted to teach it. It was my great good fortune to find Kyria who has been, in my opinion, the ideal protégé and the best person to carry my work forward. She’s as gifted in understanding the art of movement as she is in marketing and promoting our work for the rest of the world to experience.
4. Find a good teacher.
How can you be or find a good instructor when people don’t know what they don’t know? It’s ignorance. It starts with our physical education program. It’s crap. It’s about winning. Or about who’s got the ball. We don’t have proper physical education. We don’t know how the body is put together. We don’t learn, “What makes Sammy run?” We’re just thrown in to the pool.
Dancers and those who’ve made it their business to get a good education in movement therapy or kinesiology make the best Pilates teachers. Pilates is not an exercise program, it’s a movement program. Most teachers don’t understand that. Doing Pilates well depends on whom you study with.
I hope we get into studying Body Contrology as an art and a science. Going forward, I can say with all confidence that our Fletcher faculty are among the best at disseminating the art of movement.
5. There’s no such thing as Classic Pilates.
That term is from people who don’t want the original work changed. But I told Clara Pilates, “I want to get up and move!” She told me that she and Joe had only touched the tip of the iceberg and she knew I would be the one to take the work forward.
Now I’m the one most talked about because I’ve done the most innovation. I was the first to take the work vertical—it was all supine before—and people disagreed with that. I was the first to make gaits across the floor to rhythm. They didn’t like that either. There’s a lot of jealousy out there. People don’t realize that what I do is the basic truth, concept and philosophy of what Joe called Body Contrology, which is control of the mind, breath, body and spirit.
6. It all starts with the feet.
I think I always knew that the work starts with the feet, but I knew it for sure when I started working with Martha Graham. We worked barefoot a great deal, which I think people should do. You want to feel your feet, your digits, your foot’s center. She had us stay still for a long while. That’s hard to do. The feet are the foundation of the building—the body’s the building. If the feet are in the correct position, then the ankles, knees, hips and everything upward are all going to be in position. If the feet are not correct, your hip, for instance, might stick out, and there will be a counterbalance to the body—maybe a shoulder will stick out.
7. I hit bottom.
I’m a recovering alcoholic. This is my 44th year of sobriety. I had a lot of bad times early on with drinking and working. During my 12 years choreographing the Ice Capades—without being a skater, mind you—I was drinking and hung-over a lot. It became my medicine. When you’re scared, you have another drink. In 1967, I was finally fired from the Ice Capades because I missed opening night at Madison Square Garden. But getting fired was the best thing that ever happened to me. That’s called hitting bottom. That began my first steps toward sobriety. I started going to AA meetings every day. In AA, there’s much talk about our higher power, God or Buddha. My higher power was watching out for me. Something kept me on the right track.
And every day I went to work with Clara Pilates. That was great therapy. I never even wanted another drink again.
8. We’re in a constant fight against gravity.
The body is a little [messed] up. I have to talk to the designer of the body about that: I’d say, “Why did you do this? Straighten this out.” I’ve seen so many people with so little awareness of their body parts. Ninety nine out of 100 people have bad posture. They’re unaware of their physicality. Over the years, I’ve learned a lot about the body and the joy of moving through space. We come out of the womb as perfect creatures, but we don’t grow up that way because we’re not educated to understand the body. We go from perfect to an old, bent-over schlump. Everybody lets their shoulders go forward slightly. A lot of that is gravity. We need to mind our own bodies.
It’s a given that living well, whether you’re a dentist or a dancer, requires understanding your body and treating it well. It also depends on your genes as well as how you tend to yourself. Doing this work keeps the body in good shape in terms of the parts working together as a whole. Work from the bones. Think from the bones. Any movement you do, whether it’s Pilates, dance or dentistry, should come from deep inside the body.
Heidi Dvorak is a freelance writer based in Los Angeles.