Back to Pilates: the Ron Fletcher work combines Pilates, Graham, and percussive breathing for maximum potential.

IN TODAY'S CELEBRITY-DRIVEN culture, Pilates--a style of body conditioning that's been around since the 1930s--is enjoying new popularity. Most instructors working today are not old enough to have studied directly with Joseph Pilates and his wife, Clara, although there are a few, including 82-year-old Run Fletcher, a lively and still-limber man who studied with Martha Graham in the late 1940s, and went to see Pilates in 1947 after experiencing chronic knee pain.

BREATHING LESSONS

Fletcher created The Ron Fletcher Work(TM), a movement regimen he culled from Pilates exercises, Graham technique, and what he calls percussive breathing. Were they alive today, Graham and Pilates might be surprised to find their work combined, since, says Fletcher, each complained to him about the other. (Pilates thought Graham was crazy; she dismissed Pilates as a randy old goat, and, says Fletcher, each had a point.) But what they shared was a belief that breath was integral to movement.

"Joe used to say, 'Out de air, in de air,' and Graham would inhale, contract, exhale," Fletcher said in a post-workshop interview last June in San Francisco. "Two bigger egos have never existed than Joe and Martha, but they were basically saying the same thing. I've taken the basic Pilates technique but added to it, modifying the neutral spine and adding port de bras and the glory of Martha's movement. That way dancers get a 'goosing,' and move to their full potential."

A Missouri native whose dance training was limited to free tap lessons he scrounged during the Depression ("I put on tap shoes and could hoof like a little SOB," he said), Fletcher left school early and found advertising work with Saks Fifth Avenue in New York. But after a friend took him to a Graham concert, Fletcher decided he wanted to study with her. "I would leave Saks early and race over to the Graham studio and wait on a bench in the hall," he said. "I asked to see Graham every day for three weeks. She finally emerged, and said, 'I've heard a lot about you, and I came out because you rather remind me of me.'"

He told Graham he wanted to dance, and though his experience was limited, iris determination pleased her, and his timing was good--it was after the war, and she was adding men to the company. After a look at his turnout, she decided to take him on, provided he would commit to six hours a day in the studio. His parents thought he was crazy, he said, but he did it, while earning a living by doing copywriting piecework at night. "I was working for Sears, writing about men's underwear, plus doing some modeling," he said. "For years, my legs and butt were in the Sears catalogue."

Eventually, the intensive studying with Graham and working on Broadway took their toll. "I would bend my knee and then I couldn't straighten it," he said. "I'd have to shake it out, pop it, and oh, the pain! I used to get massages, or they'd shoot my knee full of dope." He went to see a doctor, who recommended surgery; but before he resorted to that, a fellow dancer, Allegra Kent, told him about Pilates.

"I almost didn't go back after the first time because the studio looked so spooky," he said. "The machines looked liked guillotines. But Pilates had magic hands--he just seemed to know what to do." Fletcher's knee improved, and he became enamored of the Pilates regimen, although he didn't begin thinking about it in career terms until the '60s, when he was choreographing for the Ice Capades--a lucrative career that he didn't enjoy--and drinking heavily. After getting drunk on an opening night at Madison Square Garden, he lost his contract, after which he joined Alcoholics Anonymous, turned to Pilates as therapy, and ultimately decided to teach.

Clara Pilates suggested he take over the studio, but he'd had enough of New York, so he left for L.A. and in 1971, he opened The Ron Fletcher School of Body Contrology above a beauty salon at the tony intersection of Rodeo and Wilshire. He called it a movement class, and said his reputation as a dancer attracted film people, including Ali MacGraw and Katherine Ross, which in turn drew media attention and boosted the business. He ran the studio for seven years, then left it to two of his students and began conducting workshops around the country.

PURE PILATES

These days, he typically teaches one or two workshops per month--a schedule he intends to stick with until he's at least 85--and continues to add new dimensions to Pilates work. He also hopes to create what he's calling "an institute for the Fletcher Program of Study." Since expanding his teaching practice, Fletcher has seen all increase in Pilates's appeal, and in the number of Pilates instructors, some of whom, he believes, don't always have proper training or the best intentions. "The form has become bastardized, but eventually people will realize they won't get rich doing this--there are too many of them--and the good teachers will remain," he said.

Former dancer Kathy Grant, one of Fletcher's few contemporaries and one of only two people to have been certified by Joseph himself, also studied Pilates after an injury; she now teaches it at Tisch School of the Arts. She has taken a Fletcher workshop, and says his style is true to the spirit of Pilates, if not to the letter. "Mr. Pilates always emphasized core strength and fluidity, and Ron has captured that in his own way," she said. Grant, who has worked with dancers from Dance Theatre of Harlem and the Jose Limon and Paul Taylor companies, said she and Fletcher were drawn to Pilates because it helped to rehabilitate injured dancers before the advent of physical therapy. It has endured, she said, because "You don't have to stand up. You don't overuse your muscles, which dancers tend to do. lf you have your core strength, you can work on what Pilates called 'the limbs of the tree.'"

Kevin Bowen, president of the Pilates Method Alliance, a nonprofit group that aims to set international training standards, says his organization supports The Ron Fletcher Work. "We revere him as an elder teacher. He was the first person to take the work standing, and he's done some innovative towel work," Bowen said. "Because he was creative, he was able to move the work on. although he still preaches about Body Contrology, which was what Joe called it. Because of his background, he did something different, and that makes him unique."

Fletcher has his detractors, he says--people who don't like the noisy, percussive breathing or the Graham influence, but he feels he's carrying on the work as Joseph and Clara would have wanted, as both exercise and art. "Joe was an athlete ... but Clara didn't work that way--she emphasized the aesthetics," he said. "The work itself gets at very specific parts of the body, enhancing the movement, bringing more power and physicality to it. Pilates and dance are a wonderful marriage, depending on how they're taught."

Heather Wisher is a former associate editor of DANCE MAGAZINE.