The presence of absences: Unconscious performances and muscle memories in Pilates

This article synthesizes the scholarly areas of dance studies, somatic research and kinaesiology, to illustrate how Pilates history continuously overlooks values culturally transmitted from body-to-body through Pilates practice. In this process, I suggest that not all embodied memories have liberatory effects. This could be potentially problematic, especially with respect to the historical marginalization and invisiblization of non-white bodies. I maintain by making the goal of Pilates an ‘unconscious’ and therefore unreflective performance of its exercise, it perpetuates specific cultural and behavioural values.