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

Article Excerpt
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...

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