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Written by Esperanza Aparicio and Javier Pérez Pont

PART ONE

WHAT HAPPENED TO JOE’S LEGACY?

I believe that knowledge of documented history orients, defines and completes us as educators, at the same time that we do justice to the people who participated in it and to the truth.

There is a very important point to talk about, and that is the respect for Joe’s legacy. Even today many people, some for personal and/or professional interests and others for different reasons, do not know or recognize the documented truth.

In 2013 we wrote “Hubertus Joseph Pilates, The Byography” to fulfill Romana’s wish to pay tribute to his teacher and this was a historical milestone as it was the first biography about someone as important to us as Joe Pilates while filling a void. absolute about the real Joe Pilates. A publication that marks a before and after. A history that draws us, with documentation, who Joe Pilates was, what he did and what he wanted for the world. Before this publication we only had the oral accounts of Romana herself and a bag of inventions in the purest Harry Potter style about his biography.

Today, in this short lecture, we would like to contribute to help all users of the Romana Pilates community to know our history better and defend it with pride.

The subject of this first part of the speech, in a very condensed form, is: Did Joe leave a will? The answer is yes.

On the one hand, we will obviously analyze his material legacy. And, on the other hand, the legacy of Contrology know-how, legally “inherited” by The Pilates Foundation for Physical Fitness created in 1964 with his legal consent.

Once we have heard the answer developed with documents and historical facts, we will move on to the second part of this reading to review Romana’s life and analyze what happened to her during her lifetime and our mission in the preservation of her heritage.

FACTS

Regarding the first part, the material legacy of Joe Pilates:

Joe Pilates signed a notarized will appointing his wife Clara as executor of his material assets, which included his country house and the Studio business, along with all the contents thereof, in addition to his personal property, of course.

After Joe’s death in October 1967, after a couple of weeks of mourning at the original studio, things continued as before. Romana continued to help Clara manage the business while working part-time in the studio along with the rest of the instructor team, Hanna and John Winters.

Two years pass until John H. Steel, a client of the Studio and Clara’s attorney, on September 19, 1969, after meeting with Clara Pilates to discuss her retirement, and also with the goal of restarting the Pilates Foundation, sends, along with Julie Clayburgh and Arthur Steel, a letter to clients and friends of Joe’s who might be interested in a joint investment to buy the business from Clara.

Clara Pilates’ wise intention was to retire and ensure the continuity of the studio to guarantee Joe’s legacy and her own, and at the same time obtain a financial return. Clara had estimated the transfer at $25,000. This would include the training equipment and use of the method, premises, books, documents and films. Clara intended to continue to collaborate with the studio, but not out of contractual obligation.

An interim committee consists of John Steel, Julie Clayburgh, Frank Milton, Dan Reed, Arthur Steel and James Limpton. The purpose of the Interim Committee was to raise enough money from supporters to fulfill Clara’s wishes.

Three months later, on December 16, 1969, the members of the Interim Committee meet with potential investors and make important decisions about the future. At the meeting it is decided that, after exploring various alternatives, Romana Kryzanowska would certainly “be an ideal person to take over the studio” and that “it is her intention to continue Joe’s work in its strictest form.” In addition, “she has experience in running the studio and feels she can rebuild the business and train more teachers”.

The Committee arranged the following for Clara: the new company will continue to pay for her apartment as long as she wants to stay in it and Clara will be hired as a consultant with no obligations to the firm and with a salary.

The new company offers Romana, after a unanimous vote of the entire Committee, the opportunity to begin managing the Firm immediately if she accepts. Romana is forced to negotiate a temporary arrangement due to her other professional obligations. As a result, from January through August 1970 she will work from 9:00 am to 2:00 pm, and starting in September she will work in the studio full time. She will be in charge of everything related to the studio except bookkeeping, bill paying and bank deposits. In return she will receive a fixed salary plus a percentage of the annual profits of the business, if any.

Although the new company was founded on March 3, 1970, it does not start operating legally until the end of August, when all the partners are committed, Clara has signed all the necessary documents and Romana Kryzanowska is free to devote herself full-time to the studio. The name of the new company is “939 Studio Corporation”, better known as “Studio 939”.

On June 4, 1973, 939 Studio Corporation, until then owner of the original studio, changes its name, becoming known as Pilates Studio Inc. Here we see the corporation’s first attempt to use and protect the Pilates name. In the same transaction, Romana Kryzanowska becomes the largest shareholder of the group with 40% of the company’s shares.

Later in this speech we will return to this point to learn how seven years later, before Clara Pilates’ death, Romana finally becomes the owner of the entire business and the contents of the Studio.

Regarding the “know-how” of the method, “Joe’s other legacy”, we must remember that in 1965 Joe signed documents before the Pilates Foundation by which he gave his irrevocable consent to the use of his name and an irrevocable commitment. license to use his system of exercises and his apparatus, thus giving the name Pilates to the method, the exercises and the equipment.

Once again, we see John Steel attempting to revitalize the Pilates Foundation and, in a letter dated March 1, 1971, he admits that there have been no meetings of The Pilates Foundation for Physical Fitness Inc. since Joe’s death and, therefore, it has become dormant. The last Foundation meeting for which we have documentation is that of February 2, 1967, seven months after Joe’s death.

Now they want to reactivate the Foundation and, therefore, request a meeting to select the members of the Board of Directors. At this meeting it is voted that Catherine di Montezemolo and Ruth Bocour, James Trosch, Arthur J. Steel, Hugo Beville Jr. and Julia Clayburgh will be the new directors of the Pilates Foundation for a period of one year, until new elections are held. he said.

The immediate objective of the foundation is “to be able to contribute to the perpetuation of the work of Joseph Pilates by complementing the activity of the Studio in the education and training of qualified instructors in the Pilates system”.

In 1976 John Steel, who until then had been Clara’s right-hand man and one of the driving forces behind the Studio in recent years, announced in a letter to the members of Pilates Studio Inc. that, after more than five years as director of the Studio, he was resigning due to lack of time. Before announcing his decision, he spoke at length with Romana Kryzanowska about the new responsibilities he would have to assume.

The entire board of directors of the Foundation supported the idea of Romana becoming the person in total charge of the business from that moment on. It should be remembered that Romana had already been a director of the firm for some years, but not of the Foundation. John Steel transferred his shares to her, leaving her with 66 percent. Romana called a new board of directors to discuss the new situation, since she did not want to be the new director of the company and suggested other people for the meeting who could fill the vacant position. Romana’s nominees were Cathy di Montezemolo, Gloria Milliken, Dan Reed, Emre J. Rosenthal, Lari Staton, Arthur J. Steel and Robert Sweet.

Very shortly thereafter, Romana would go on to own the entire business and take the reins of the Foundation, just before Clara’s death on May 13, 1977. The beautiful and humble summary of all of the above, and so I remember, and probably many of you do, is beautifully described in the following paragraph in Romana’s own words.

Romana didn’t even think about spending the rest of her life teaching Contrology which she loved so much, as “I didn’t have time to think about the future, I was too busy working and trying to keep things going as usual”.

Each artist is the creator of his or her own work, and Romana’s case with Contrology is no exception. She became, and over time we see it more clearly, the creator of her own interpretation of the work bequeathed by Joe. Contrology is the masterpiece created by Joe and legally and legitimately inherited by Romana, who passed it on to all of us, and most especially to her beloved daughter Sari Mejia.

PART TWO

WHAT IS THE ROMANA LEGACY ABOUT?

When Daria asked me to do this talk today, to talk about Romana’s life and her legacy, I did not understand why and what meaning this could have in our Conference, since we have written a lot about her in the Biography of Joe Pilates, and I have spoken in the last Congresses where I have participated and besides, all my colleagues who studied with her remember her and incorporate her every day in their teachings, just as Romana did every day with Joe Pilates and Clara.

After several weeks of pondering in a vacuum, I thought it was an honor and an obligation to seize this important opportunity. We call ourselves, defend ourselves and present ourselves to the world under her name and it is our obligation to remember and honor her more than ever.

There is a tendency of human beings to forget their origins and their past, instead of learning from them and at the same time giving them their deserved place in history. In these times of new technologies, the rapidity in considering what happened yesterday as old and obsolete and consequently the ethical change in our behavior and way of seeing the world, we must avoid what happened to Romana. with Joe We cannot relax her memory on someone like her because we carry her name and we are trying to continue her legacy. We must be constant in our efforts and try to right the wrongs of the past and do justice. I remember that ultimately Justice would mean “giving each person what they deserve”.

And we say that we can not relax in this regard because the new generations, and there are too many years without her, too many students and new teachers around the world, who have not personally met Romana.

The work and its author cannot be dissociated. Therefore, to understand the work we must necessarily know the character who produced this work. In the case of Romana, and for those of us who have known her, it is impossible not to remember her in every step we take in our daily lives.

We have the duty to make known the person behind our name, and take advantage of this Conference to celebrate that she continues and will continue to live in our hearts and spirits. The Controlology that we have learned bears her imprint indissolubly, since it was she who brought it to us from Joe Pilates.

We have already heard in detail at the beginning of this speech how Romana inherited everything from her marriage. And the big question we should ask ourselves now is what have we inherited from Romana Kryzanowska? What makes us all different?

My opinion on this issue is mainly his ethical and philosophical legacy related to Controlology rather than in the choreographic or apparatological sense where his contribution also bears the stamp of his mastery and genius. But before developing this point, let’s make a very brief review of his biography.

Hold on to your chairs now to enjoy a dizzying summary of a life so intense that it deserves its fame. We are going to recount her life chronologically and avoiding quoting almost all specific dates and many details, which has been very difficult due to the affectionate attachment she has towards it.

We will place Romana’s birth in a family context to understand from the beginning how it was decisive for the rest of her life.

On his father’s side we will have to travel to Poland and Russia to locate his grandparents. He, a military engineer, and she, Countess Felsra of Warsaw.

The second child of the marriage was Romana’s father. Roman Krzyzanowsky, born in Balta, Russia. Roman’s aristocratic name was Count Roman of Ferry Krizanowsky Donanoff of Russia.

After the divorce of Romana’s grandparents, the mother with the children settled in St. Petersburg and the father emigrated to the United States.

Romana’s young father traveled and studied painting in various places in Europe, including Paris, before emigrating and settling permanently in Detroit.

On the maternal side of Romana’s ancestors, there are the Picketts, originally from North Carolina, and the Burgess-Fishers from Virginia.

Romana’s grandparents, Anderson Jacob Pickett and Melvina Burgess-Fisher, first resided in Shelbyville, Kentucky, where Romana’s mother, Sarah Matilda, was born, and then moved to Farmington, Michigan.

Sarah Matilda Pickett, also a painter, and Roman Krzyzanowsky, met in Detroit and married in the middle of World War I, with the bad news that the Soviets murdered the entire family still in Russia and confiscated all their belongings. goods.

The first thing Romana’s parents did after World War I was to travel and study painting for a time in various European countries such as France and Spain. Upon returning from their extensive travels, Romana’s parents lived for a time first in New York and then again in Detroit. After eight years of marriage, they conceived their only daughter, Romana, in Farmington.

In the first six years of her life, Romana remembers the constant smell of paint in her house and it is here, a month before her sixth birthday, when her father Román died possibly due to heart failure. This caused her an enormous trauma due to the infinite love she had for her father.

Life must go on and so Roman’s mother remarries the following year to Wilhelm Erich Leesemann, he was none other than Roman’s closest friend and the one who found Roman dead on his couch.

The new Leesemann-Kryzanowsky family moved to live in New Smyrna, Florida, near Daytona. This was the house that Aunt Pauline had there along with aviator Amelia Earhart. There, with the landscape still half wild and among orange blossom scents, Romana will live her first childhood.

In her last year of school, the very young Romana suffered an illness that forced her mother to make the decision to send her to live in Puerto Rico for a year with her uncle Constant Julian Kryzanowski.

A year later, she returned to live in Detroit with her family and Romana began studying ballet at the School of Dance and Drama and studied piano for two years. At that time, Romana’s mother had divorced her second husband and found love in an Irish immigrant named Michael Brodigan.

When Romana graduated from high school at the age of 18, she returned to live with her uncle Kryzanowsky in Baltimore with the dream of auditioning and entering the School of American Ballet to finish her career as a ballerina. Romana’s director at the dance school was the great Anatole Oboukhoff, whom she still remembered with tears a few months before he passed away.

Towards the end of 1942, and with her mother back in New York with her third husband, the young Romana was nineteen years old and suffering from a heel spur that prevented her from dancing. They visited three different doctors and all three told her that she had to have an operation. Mr. George Balanchine took her to meet someone. It was her friend Joe Pilates.

After the first class with Joe, Romana left the studio quite confused and amazed by “that unusual place” and upon returning home she told her mother that “it was a horrible place, I don’t like it and I don’t want to go back”. She complained that this man had designed an entire class for her and “hadn’t paid special attention to her ankle”. Despite this and forced by her mother, Romana continued to visit Joe Pilates as many times a week as she could.

After a year, Joe asked Romana to collaborate as an assistant in the studio. Then, Joe, Clara and Romana began a friendship that extended beyond the four walls of the Studio.

During Romana and her mother’s stay in New York, one Saturday afternoon a month, a group of painters from New York’s West Village used to open the doors of their apartments so that other artists and friends could come and see their work. They conversed and appreciated their exhibited works, networking and exchanging views on art, painting trends, etc.

Romana’s mother was also in this artistic circle, of course. One day, Romana’s mother had organized one of these events in her own home and Romana was preparing to attend the morning ballet session at the Metropolitan Opera with some friends from school.

Romana’s mother asked her to stay for a while to help with the guests. At that event Romana was wearing a white dress tightly fitted to her small body and was still walking barefoot around the house to rest her feet from so much “tiptoe” work. She wore her reddish blonde hair loose and a beautiful necklace around her neck.

Michael Brodigan, her mother’s third husband and Romana’s stepfather, invited a Peruvian businessman named Pablo José Enrique León Mejía Tupayachi, abbreviated to Pablo Mejía, to that day. The attraction between her and Pablo was immediate.

Pablo Mejía was a very wealthy Peruvian businessman from a family of ancient lineage, and it is even said that his family tree dates back to the time of the Incas.

According to Romana’s recollection, on the second date with Pablo Mejia, he invited her to see the Petrushka ballet and then to dinner at the famous Russian Tea Room on 57th Street. On this same occasion, Pablo asked Romana to marry him to which she immediately said yes.

At 9 a.m. on Tuesday, July 11, 1944, Roman Romanova as written on the wedding invitation, just turned twenty-one years old, and Paul twenty-nine, were married in the Lady Chapel of St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue. .

They had a wedding party with family and friends at Romana’s mother’s apartment and among the guests was the Pilates couple.

The new couple immediately traveled to settle in Peru. Their arrival was announced in the national newspapers and now he calls Romana as Señora Romana de María Mejía, apparently trying to recover the noble title that would correspond to his current position.

Once in Peru, Pablo Mejia showed his new wife all the delights of this country as well as having a busy social life both day and night, enjoying house parties with friends, walks in picturesque places and discos with orchestras.

Romana was in love with her new country, its culture and its people. From the moment she arrived in Peru she began to learn and practice Spanish and also learned to speak a little of a variant of the Quechua language, which is widespread among the Peruvian Indians.

Romana Kryzanowska finally gives birth to her first child. It is a girl who will be baptized with the name of Sari Salome. Our Sari.

In her early years in Peru, Romana Kryzanowska used to travel to New York to visit her mother who, before moving permanently to Peru, divorced her third husband and met in New York the man who would become her fourth and last husband in 1950. She met in New York the man who would become her fourth and last husband in 1950, a tall, blond, blue-eyed Danish gentleman named Knud von Laub.

Peruvian society lives and will live in the immediate future great social and political convulsions, alternating democratic periods with military coups.

After fourteen years in Peru, Romana Kryzanowska finds it increasingly intolerable to stay there and decides to return to her country. Pablo, her husband, decides to stay for a while to solve the problems of his family and his business. The separation was painful for everyone, but Romana remained firm in her decision, despite having a great life in every way in South America.

The family, consisting of two children, two dogs and two grandparents, moves in early November 1957 to live at Aunt Pauline’s house in Orlando, Florida, where they will be able to enjoy their beautiful garden.

Later, Romana traveled alone to the Big Apple in order to look for work and residence for the rest of her family living in Florida. She visited the Pilates couple to ask them for a job and re-enrolled at the School of American Ballet to take classes there since her idea, apart from working at the Pilates Studio, was to return to the stage as a dancer in order to earn a living. family.

Almost a year after arriving in Florida, Romana and the rest of the family will move to the Chelsea Hotel in New York.

Joe ordered the fixtures for the new studio from Gratz-Treitel Company through Romana Kryzanowska. They both knew the firm from before, because Joe had hired them to do some repairs in the studio.

After Joe’s death, after a couple of weeks of mourning in the studio, things continued as before. Romana continued to help Clara manage the business by working there part-time.

Three years later, in 1970, Clara Pilates decided to retire and formed a corporation with the participation of 25 investors, including Romana herself.

In August 1972, the original studio and 8th Avenue where it was located were no longer ideal locations for clients and they decided to move to the sixth floor of 29 West 56th Street.

In 1973 Sari Mexía (Mejía) returned from Europe where she worked as a dancer and continued for a while longer in different dance groups in New York. She fell in love with a musician named Roberto Pace and married him on December 1, 1974 at the famous St. Malachy’s Roman Catholic Church in Manhattan.

Clara Pilates would also attend the marriage of Sari Mejia and Roberto Pace, along with other family members and friends. Once married, Sari began working part-time with her mother at the Pilates Studio and completely abandoned the world of dans.

In 1975 Romana began a very interesting collaboration with the State University of New York at Purchase. The class was part of the dance curriculum and ran on Fridays. It was mandatory for all students throughout the year. Romana would teach the class for the next seven years, until 1982, giving it the name “Body Correctives”. Sari also used to go sometimes to help her mother.

In April 1977, Clara Pilates suffered a fall that caused her to fracture her hip and she had to undergo surgery at St. Clare’s Hospital and finally she never went out again because she died there due to complications from her operation at the age of 94. At that time, Romana already owned the entire business.

Romana Kryzanowska had insurmountable difficulties with the 56th Street studio and was forced in 1984 to sell the business to a client friend named Lari Stanton, owner of a business called Aris Isotoner Gloves, Inc.

Two years later, in 1986, Lari Stanton sold the entire business to Healite, Inc. They then moved the studio in 1988 to 160, East 56th Street, eighth floor between Third Avenue and Lexington Avenue.

Things at the studio continued to get worse when just four months after this move to the new studio, on April 1, 1989, they had to violently close the studio due to non-payment of taxes by Healite’s owner.

A great catastrophe that Romana will save by distributing the equipment, her teachers with their clients and students in different places that she already knew and with which she collaborated, such as the fashionable gym at that time called Body Arts on 63rd Street and 3rd Avenue, the chiropractor Howard Schiell and Drago’s Gym. The rest of the equipment and material that she could not place anywhere were temporarily deposited in a storage room.

Romana already had a certain friendship with Dragutin Mehandzi, who had a gym on 57th Street. After talking to him about the possibility of teaching classes in a small corner of his gym, with only one Reformer, he agreed to her request. . At first she went to Sari to teach there, sharing this space with other teachers while Romana went from one place to another until she settled definitively in Drago’s Gym in 1991.

Drago’s Gym will become Romama and Sari’s permanent home until 2005, when she will move permanently to Fort Worth to live with her son Paul.

But what specifically have we inherited from Romana? What is it that gives us a particular and unique stamp?

And these questions make more sense than ever in these times. Advertising and consumerism have distorted the method, reducing it only to aesthetics, and sometimes simply to the vulgarization of Contrology and meaninglessness. As the great Italian architect Renzo Piano and Romana herself said, “beauty is also good”, but it is difficult to combine these terms. Often the dimension remains only on the surface, but it is much deeper”.

As we all know and should remember, the Pilates method is not a choreography nor a sports performance, but an orderly exercise under the tutelage of common sense given to each person in a personalized way.

Knowing the person reveals a way to know his personality, his character and the ethical values imprinted in his work. And we are of the opinion that ethics are the limits of our world, so here is the importance of the heritage of our dear Romana.

In the case we are dealing with, which is Controlology through Romana, we have learned a mental and physical work loaded with intrinsic ethical values for the effects of the method, let’s call it “spiritual”, as was also the desire of Joe Pilates himself … .

Let’s start with what came out, that Esperanza and I remembered, only two days into the certification program, Romana’s first lesson in this sense. And she told us, as she used to do when she said something very important, looking us in the eyes: “never forget, Respect, Humility and Work, these are the virtues to be a good teacher”. What three words! We have never been able to forget them and they remain our pillar and guide to this day.

She irremediably used to, as inherent to her mandate when teaching, whip the spirit of those who took the class and of those who observed with an ethical charge giving meaning to the movement itself.

Who does not remember her speaking and solving problems proposing the exercise of Common Sense. Another impressive lesson that forced those who learned with her to develop and improve this fundamental aspect not only for the teaching of the method but also for the rest of the activities. in your ordinary life.

These and other ethical categories are the foundations of our Contrology. And these pillars are what remind us of our craft, what place us precisely where we belong in this legacy. And it is our obligation and duty, with the confidence that what we have been taught is correct, perfect and complete, to understand, with practice and will, this colossal inherited legacy.

Not only have we inherited the ethical burden of what we do, but this inheritance is also completed with his reflections and syntheses on the system that have no other qualification than genius, such as the creation of the six fundamental principles: Center, Control, Concentration, Flow, Breathing and Precision. Flow, Breathing and Precision.

And so we come to another enormous contribution of Romana’s genius, although she attributed it to Joe, which are the five parts of the mind to be a good teacher and student, not a client, of Controlology. Namely, Imagination, Intelligence, Intuition, Memory and Will.

You will forgive us a small incursion into our preferences by choosing among all of them the Will as the most powerful and fundamental, without which the others would be “lame”, without support. So, without this fundamental and elementary part, the will, the other parts of the mind that Romana cites could not work together nor would they have the coordination that is needed between them.

One of the many meanings the word Wiil can have is “to achieve by force of will”, and to paraphrase Joe “the primary essence of the Pilates system is mental discipline”. For Romana that is so true that the word was constantly on her lips, recommending it to clients and students as the only way to achieve anything in life. Discipline is the key, and for that we must first obtain a strong Will. Thus discipline together with perseverance become the science of all sciences to walk correctly in Contrology.

I am a person who particularly loves classical music in general. When I like a piano concerto, for example, by a particular composer, I usually hear the same piece by many different performers. The score remains exactly the same but what varies is the interpretation of this score, without changing a note.

We also think of Romana as our composer and our role is only to achieve a correct and wonderful interpretation of her score. Nothing more, nothing less, and that is why we proudly carry her name on our backs.

This very idea positions us, as Leonard Bernstein himself recounted in a CBS program in 1960, under our “performance instinct”, or going even further, with the “artistic gift”. In our opinion, this should be Romana’s legacy to her students, to offer us this “artistic gift”, this kind of artistic freedom over her score.

Let us teach each one to be his own master and we must put aside everything we think we know and contribute to the method because Romana’s inheritance is complete and perfect. And we call ourselves and present ourselves to the world under her name. Her legacy needs no additions but a wonderful interpretation of her score. We are masters of something greater than ourselves and accepting it in this way frees ourselves and the world for the purposes of Controlology.

To conclude this approach to Romana’s legacy, I will summarize it with a testimony that came to me unexpectedly from our dear teacher Diana Bolaños, who has also translated this text wonderfully. I think it gets to the heart of the matter in a simple, straightforward and correct way, as Romana liked. Let us remember that simple is better than complicated and that Less is More as Romana constantly reminded us.

“I had the joy of meeting Romana in person and sharing with her several moments that I treasure. But I always see and feel Romana through the eyes of Sari and Daria and you, the Level Masters, who lived with her and learned hundreds of things. thanks to the wonderful gifts she was given. When you all talk about Romana or show us how she passed on her heritage to you, your eyes light up and I can feel Romana’s heritage, like a kind of DNA that for me is not present genetically but rather in spirit”.