Feature Cynthia

Cynthia Lochard

Cynthia Lochard was only 16 years old and a young dancer with the New York City Ballet when she started learning the Pilates method from Joseph Pilates’ protégé Romana Kryzanowska and her teaching crew of colourful ex-dancers. Twenty years later when she opened the first Romana’s Pilates studio in Sydney in 1994 Cynthia chose Surry Hills because “it was the only area in Sydney that remotely reminded me of New York”.

In the 70s and 80s while still living in New York, Cynthia danced with some of the worlds greatest dance companies and choreographers who are now considered dance legends including George Balanchine, Jerome Robbins, Twyla Tharp, Lar Lubovitch and Graham Murphy. She was also a cast member of the  1980 hit film “Fame” working with celebrated modern-dance choreographer Louis Falco.

She maintains it was her work with Romana that kept her strong and injury-free as a young dancer.

“I danced from the age of 4 but it was when I started Pilates that I felt I really started to dance for the first time. It gave me a lot more physical stamina, it gave me freedom to enjoy the music more and to play with different rhyhms because I had so much control and I could sustain my balance so much better.”

It was double-edged blessing for Cynthia because it meant she seldom got a night off because when her colleagues were injured she would have to replace them because she was always healthy. “ So it was a good and a bad thing,” she now says laughing.

When she moved to Sydney there were only a small handful of pilates studios operating but Cynthia found the work “unfamiliar” with what she had learnt with Romana. While with the Sydney Dance Company, Cynthia helped convince SDC to allow Megan Williams to set up a Pilates studio at the Wharf for the SDC dancers. Cynthia later taught Pilates and classical ballet to the dancers of the Bangarra Dance Company, in their early years. Cynthia eventually set up her own studio in 1994 and has never looked back.

In 2009 Cynthia was awarded Level 1 instructor status in Romana’s Pilates joining the handful of people responsible for overseeing the testing and levelling of other individuals who are involved in teaching and passing down the work of Joseph Pilates.

“I don’t really believe in levels. I am just doing what I have always done. I think the  more you do the work the more experience you gain,” Cynthia says. “I have always had a lot of integrity in the work. I never teach or approach anything that I am not comfortable or absolutely confident of in myself,

She says being Level 1  “means a lot of hard work, commitment, integrity and sustained passion for the work in order to really do it justice.”

“People are recognizing this studio and what it has to offer in that regard I am very grateful,” Cynthia says.