In 1954 Lolita joined the Metropolitan Opera Ballet, and while with them suffered a knee injury in 1958. The surgeon told her she did not need surgery, but would require strengthening the quadriceps to protect the knee joint and recommended going to train with Carola Trier, who had been trained by Joe.
This was Lolita’s introduction to the Pilates Method, and the start of a romance, which continues to this nearly 60 years later. Carola suggested to Lolita that when she stopped dancing she should become her apprentice in the Pilates Method. With the support of New York State University, it took Lolita 20 hours per week for six months to become the only person that Carola Trier ever certified. During her apprenticeship, Lolita became friends with Kathy Grant, Carola’s assistant, who informed her that Joe was alive and had his studio a few blocks away.
The pair set off to meet him and request that he train and certify them as teachers of his method. He agreed and after 500 hours of self practice, observation and assisted teaching Lolita and Kathy became the only people Joe ever certified to teach his method.
He was living in England, working as a
boxer and self-defense instructor when World War I broke out, which led him to
be considered an “enemy alien” and therefore interned at a camp near Lancaster,
then later one on the Isle of Man.
Determined that life in a camp would not prevent him taking daily exercise, he began to instruct other detainees in the routines he had created for himself, which he proclaimed enabled them to resist a severe influenza epidemic that affected the camp in 1918.
While in the camp on the Isle of Man Joe worked as a nurse in the hospital, this gave him the opportunity to work hands on with patients through their rehabilitation exercises. He used the frames and springs from the hospital beds to create apparatus, which could at first make the movements easier, then as a person’s ability improved, make them more challenging.
When asked later in life, Joe expressed his gratitude for the experiences in the hospital “having the time and the patients with whom I could work was a wonderful opportunity.”
After the war Joe returned to Germany, living in Hamburg, teaching self-defense to the public and the police. He became interested in modern dance and worked with famous dancers Mary Wigman and Rudolf von Laban.
Joe did not like how politics in Germany were evolving in the mid 1920s, and so, in 1926 boarded the ship Westphalia, and set sail for New York. It was during this voyage he met his “match made in Heaven” Clara Zeuner.
In New York Joe started working in a gym which also housed rehearsal studios for theatre people. One of them was a Russian dancer and choreographer George Balanchine, who later founded the school of American Ballet and the New York City Ballet, recognised the benefits of The Pilates Method, so sent dancers to train with Joe.
At the start of the Thirties, Joe took control of the gym and turned it into his studio. Famous dancers and athletes of the time came to work with Joe because of the significance of his method. Joe also had celebrity clients such as Vivien Leigh, Sir Lawrence Olivier, Katherine Hepburn, and wealthy socialites the Vanderbilts, Gimbels and Guggenheims.
