Romana Kryzanowska and the survival of the classical method
Of everyone who learnt directly from Joseph Pilates, Romana Kryzanowska did the most to keep his system in one piece after he died. Plenty of his students went on to teach. Several became influential. But when a teacher today describes their training as classical, the line usually runs back to her within two or three steps, and the habits that define that style (a fixed order, quick transitions, very few repetitions) are habits she defended for most of her working life.
Her surname gets mangled constantly, including in the address of this page, so for the record: Kryzanowska. She was born on 30 June 1923 in Farmington, Michigan, near Detroit, and died in New York on 30 August 2013, at the age of 90. What follows sticks to what can be established about the years in between.
A ballet student with an injured ankle
Romana grew up in an artistic family and trained in ballet from childhood. As a teenager she went to New York to study at the School of American Ballet, which George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein had founded in 1934. There she injured an ankle badly enough for surgery to be discussed.
Balanchine knew Joseph Pilates and his studio at 939 Eighth Avenue. Instead of an operation, he took her there to see whether exercise could do the job. Accounts differ on the exact year, but it was the early 1940s and she was still in her teens.
The ankle recovered without surgery. More to the point, she kept coming back. She trained on the apparatus Joe had designed and built (the reformer, the trapeze table, the chairs and barrels) and she watched him teach. Over the following years she absorbed not only the exercises but the shape of a session as he ran it: what came first, how one exercise ran into the next, and how much was enough.
Peru, and back to Eighth Avenue
In the mid 1940s she married Pablo Mejia and moved with him to Peru, where she danced, taught the exercises privately and had two children, Paul and Sari. In 1958 she came back to New York as a single mother and went straight back to the studio.
By then Joe was in his seventies, with Clara Pilates teaching beside him. Romana worked with both of them for the best part of a decade. That second stretch matters as much as the first. She had learnt the system as a young dancer; now she was learning it as an adult teacher, watching how Joe adjusted it for clients whose bodies were nothing like hers.
Keeping the studio going
Joseph Pilates died in New York on 9 October 1967. Clara kept the studio open, and Romana stayed with her. Around 1970 Romana became director of what was by then called The Pilates Studio, and in the early 1970s it left Eighth Avenue for West 56th Street. Clara died in 1977.
The years after that were messy. The business behind the studio changed hands more than once in the 1980s, and the studio itself closed at the end of the decade. Romana went on teaching through all of it. In the early 1990s she became the senior teacher of a formal certification programme in New York that carried the original studio's name.
In 2000 a federal court in New York ruled that "Pilates" was a generic word for a method of exercise, not a trademark anyone could own. Soon afterwards Romana and her daughter Sari set up their own training organisation, Romana's Pilates, which went on to certify teachers in many countries.
Her life at a glance
| Year | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1923 | Born 30 June in Farmington, Michigan |
| Early 1940s | Injures an ankle at the School of American Ballet; Balanchine takes her to Joseph Pilates |
| Mid 1940s | Marries Pablo Mejia and moves to Peru |
| 1958 | Returns to New York and to the studio on Eighth Avenue |
| 1967 | Joseph Pilates dies; Romana stays on with Clara |
| About 1970 | Becomes director of The Pilates Studio |
| 1977 | Clara Pilates dies |
| Early 1990s | Leads teacher certification in New York |
| 2000 | A US federal court rules that Pilates is a generic term |
| Early 2000s | Sets up Romana's Pilates with her daughter |
| 2013 | Dies in New York on 30 August, aged 90 |
Why classical lineages run through her
Several of Joe's students taught for decades after his death, and they did not all teach the same way. Ron Fletcher (1921 to 2011) took the work to Los Angeles and built a style of his own around it. Kathy Grant (1921 to 2010) became known in New York for an inventive, highly individual approach to the same exercises. Their teaching belongs to the history as well, and the wider family tree is traced in our piece on the elders and the second-generation teachers they trained.
Romana's distinction was that she treated the system itself as the thing to protect. Three things set her apart:
- Time. She knew Joe across nearly three decades, from the early 1940s until his death, with the long gap in Peru in the middle.
- Order. She taught the mat and apparatus work in a set sequence, with the transitions between exercises treated as part of the work and never as a rest.
- Numbers. Between the 1970s and the 2000s she trained and certified a very large number of teachers, many of whom went on to run studios and training programmes of their own.
The result is that classical usually means, in practice, as Romana taught it. That is not quite the same as exactly as Joe did it on any given day. No teacher hands on a method without some personal habits travelling with it, and Joe varied what he gave each client. But it is the closest thing to a reference version the method has, and experienced teachers trained in other schools often go back to it for that reason, as explored in learning the classical order as an experienced teacher.
The stories she inherited
Like almost everyone who trained with him, Romana learnt Joe's life story from Joe. Some of those stories have not held up well once historians went looking for documents, and the claim that he was a sickly child who exercised his way out of asthma and rickets is the best known example (the evidence is weighed in our piece on the asthma story).
None of this touches the value of what she preserved. A biography can be embroidered in a single interview. A sequence of exercises, taught every working day for sixty years and checked against the bodies in front of you, is much harder to fake.
What to look for in a class
If you want to see her influence for yourself, book a mat class with a teacher who describes their training as classical and watch the first ten minutes closely. The Hundred comes first, then the Roll Up, the Roll Over and Single Leg Circles, with almost no pause between them. Repetitions stay low, often three to five. The teacher may cue the transition (rolling up, turning over, sitting up to face the front) as carefully as the exercise itself. That briskness, and the sense that the order is not up for negotiation, is the part of the method she spent her life making sure would outlast her.
