The Art Of Mastering Movement

A picture of Joseph Pilates and his studio at 939 Eighth Street in New York.  His wife Clara is at the right in a nurses uniform

Joseph Hubertus Pilates was born on December 8, 1880 in Monchengladbach Germany, near Dusseldorf.  He was a sickly child who had asthma and rickets.  By the  the time he reached the age of 14, he was posing as a model for anatomical charts.  This demonstrates Pilates’ desire and acumen for physical exercise and rehabilitation.  At a young age he knew how the body worked and how to support it through exercise in order to enhance ones physical condition.  His father was a prize winning gymnast and his mother was a naturopath.  These two factors also may have contributed to his sense of the physical body.

There are many versions of the Pilates’ story.  Some say that Pilates left Germany to study with a boxing expert, and others that he left Germany to be in a circus.  In either case, we know that he was in England  when World War I broke out in 1914.  He was interned during the war at an enemy alien camp first in Lancaster, England, and then on the Isle of Man.  On the Isle of Man he worked in the hospital ward helping patients rehabilitate.  During his stay the influenza pandemic of 1918 swept through Europe.  It is said that none of the patients under his care died of the disease.

After the war, Pilates went back to Germany for a short time and then travelled by ship to New York.  On his trip across the Atlantic, he meet his soon to be wife Clara.  It is not known whether Clara was a nursery school teacher or a nurse.  What we do know is that she wore a nurses uniform in the studio they started at 939 Eighth Avenue.  The studio was housed in the same building as George Balachine’s new ballet company and Martha Graham’s rehearsal space.  This is how the Pilates’ work became an integral part of many dancers’ training, and how many dancers became Pilates’ instructors. 

During this period, Pilates wrote two books: Your Health, in 1934 and Return to Life Through Contrology in 1945.  In his book Contrology, Pilates’ talks about how people living in the city and working all the time need to devote more time and thought to their physical well being.

Since we are living in this Modern Age we must of necessity devote more time and more thought to the important matter of acquiring physical fitness.  This does not necessarily imply that we must devote ourselves only to the mere development of any particular set of muscles, but rather more rationally to the uniform development of our bodies as a whole – keeping all our organs as nearly as possible in their naturally normal condition so that we may not only be in a better position to earn our daily bread but also so that we may have sufficient vitality in reserve at night for the enjoyment of compensating pleasure and relaxation (Contrology, 1945).

Pilates was always to have said that he was fifty years ahead of his time.  He died in October 1967, at the age of 87.  He died very disappointed and angry that his system of exercise never received the success he felt it deserved.  His wife Clara worked a few more years in the studio and then retired in 1970.  She lived mainly on the generosity of her students.  She died in 1976. 

Pilates left as his legacy a sense of working with the body as a whole.  His exercises that are still used today in studios, health clubs and hospitals really do help support the body to maintain it’s natural and playful state.  His exercises support the body to do any physical activity with pleasure.

Resources

0. Pilates, Joseph. Return to Life Through Contrology. Presentation Dynamics Inc. Incline Village, Nevada, 1998.

0. Lessen, Deborah.  Pilates Method Alliance Study Guide.  Pilates Method Alliance Inc. Miami, Florida, 2005.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 4th, 2009 at 5:05 pm and is filed under Joeseph Pilates, So Says Yoda. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.