pilates in the courts
everything old is news again.
today i'm sharing a link to an important article from the new york times about the exercise methodology we all know & love: pilates.
while i reeeally want you to read it, i know not everyone subscribes to the times, so i'll sum it up briefly here:
an extremely greedy, narcissistic and litigious physical therapist named sean gallagher is suing mary sullivan kelly, a pilates teacher & studio owner from boston, claiming she unlawfully used archival photos of joseph pilates on instagram. unlawful because he claims he owns the rights to them and that e v e r y o n e who wants to view or use these documents needs to pay him first. she has filed a countersuit that basically tells him to sit the f down.
sean gallagher is preposterous, but it isn't the first time he's taken unsuspecting pilates people to court. back in the 90's, gallagher sent a cease & desist to every single pilates studio in the country that used the word pilates in its name claiming he owned the rights to it. and he sued ken endelman, the man behind balanced body (and who is equal parts brilliant and kind) in a case that gallagher lost in 1998. in 2000, a judge ruled that, for better or worse, the term pilates belongs to everyone (like yoga).
you'd think that would be enough, but now gallagher claims he's somehow preserving joe's legacy by limiting others' access to & use of the archive. this is profoundly incorrect.
all mr. pilates wanted was for everyone in the world to do his method because he felt that it was the key to deep health. it's also true he wanted them to do it exactly as he did, and he created his extensive archive in the first place to help achieve this. pilates nerds everywhere rely on these photos for extensive debates about what the exact positioning is for an exercise. and pilates is, like any good movement tradition, an ever-changing thing.
but for one small and strange man to try to sabotage this goal is completely counter to what joe was after, even if mr. pilates would've been annoyed when we get creative with his method. archives are important, and by nature are not meant to be private.
it also highlights just one of the difficulties in preserving what is essentially an oral tradition over time, but that is the subject for another day. if you would you like to read more about dance research side of me/my master's degree, reply to this email with the word DANCE.
for those who do read the article, allow me to contextualize myself in the conversation: i know mary sullivan kelly. we finished our training at about the same time from romana kryzanowska's daughter, sari, at drago's gym with his septuagenarian gymnasts of the flying trapeze. sean gallagher is not representative of the classical pilates world at all. we were not allowed to even speak his name because there of the collective trauma he caused. and it is extremely concerning and frustrating that he's at it again.
what can you do? follow this account on instagram or #pilatestransparencyproject. let's keep the pilates in the pilates!
