Lotte Berk

Lieselotte "Lotte" Berk (13 January 1913 – 4 November 2003) was a German-born dancer and teacher, who lived in England from 1938. In 1959, she developed her own method of exercise drawing on her passions for dance and music with the idea of giving non-dancers a dancer's body.^[1][2] In the 21st century, derivatives of her method are offered by gyms and studios as barre classes.

Lotte Berk was born Lieselotte Heymansohn on 13 January 1913, in Cologne, Germany, to a German mother and Russian-born father, both of whom were Jewish.^[3] Her mother died of a stroke when Lotte was aged eight; her father, Nicolai Heymansohn, had been a tailor and owned a chain of menswear shops.^[4]

Berk initially studied the piano for 11 years, according to her father's wishes, but she preferred dancing. In Berk's hometown of Cologne, she studied with a female Russian teacher who had attended the Mary Wigman^[4] Academy of Dance.^[5] At 18, Lotte was dancing with prominent companies, for famous choreographers and conductors including Carl Ebert, Bruno Walter and Fritz Busch, and at such events as the Salzburg Festival in Austria.^[4]

In 1933, she married a fellow dancer Ernst Berk, and their daughter Esther (now Esther Fairfax) was born the following year.^[4] With the rise of Nazism in the 1930s, they fled Germany and, because her husband had a British passport, the family was able to live in England, where Berk worked as a model at the Chelsea Art School^[6] and danced at the Covent Garden for Marie Rambert. Berk later toured with the Entertainments National Service Association (ENSA).^[7]

Berk's style of dancing did not appeal to the British and she knew she would have to change careers to make a living. Her program, Rehabilitative Exercise^[8], was launched from a basement studio on Manchester Street in 1959.^[9] The program was based on Berk's contemporary dance career and rehabilitation for a drug addiction.^[10][11] Berk was 46 at the time, and the studio was for women only.^[12] She gave certain exercises unusual names, such as "the Prostitute", "the Peeing Dog" and the "French Lavatory".^[13]

A spinal injury sustained while teaching class, which occurred after the origination of the Rehabilitative Exercise program, was used as a pretext for Berk's innovation because she was loathe to divulge the facts of her addiction. Similar to Pilates, Berk's method concentrates on specificity, targeting muscle groups for strength and flexibility training.

In her 40s, she moved in with a painter, with the permission of her husband, who suggested that she do so for two years, after which he would take her back. At the age of 50, her 30-year marriage came to an end. She married again, to Herbert Felix Rieser, a commercial photographer, in 1964; the second marriage lasted three weeks, though they maintained a lasting friendship.^[4]

Berk continued to teach her Rehabilitative Exercise method well into her 80s. Her clients included Joan Collins, Britt Ekland, Barbra Streisand, Siân Phillips, Edna O'Brien, Yasmin Le Bon, Zoë Wanamaker, Maureen Lipman, Prue Leith, Shirley Conran, Barbara Ferris, Lee Remick, Carol Linley, Yolande Donlan, and Beverly Sassoon.^[14]

Berk died aged 90 on 4 November 2003 at the Brendoncare Foundation, Froxfield, Wiltshire.^[4] She was survived by her daughter, Esther Fairfax, who continued to teach her mother's method from a studio at Hungerford, in Berkshire, and wrote a biography of Berk entitled My Improper Mother and Me.^[15][16][17]

Lydia Bach called her new business venture the Lotte Berk Method, and it launched in the Upper East Side of New York City in 1971. In the United States, Bach explored ways to modify Berk’s methodology to cater to the American marketplace. Bach, who was well-versed in athletics, sent Berk's program onto a sports-focused trajectory.

In the United Kingdom, Esther Fairfax translated her mother's method into an organized, comprehensive, and more widely inclusive program based on her experience as a wife, mother, psychologist, and teacher -- one that would appeal to the everyday woman.

These various modifications to the original methodology, Rehabilitative Exercise, set the foundation for the Barre programs that are practiced in the United States and United Kingdom today. Berk’s and Fairfax’s intimate class size of up to ten students became the model for ‘boutique’ studios, while Bach’s expansive range of programs inspired corporate group fitness. The closing of Bach’s studios seeded the Barre industry in the United States, as several of her former teacher employees opened their own private studios and/or corporate franchises. Berk never taught outside the United Kingdom, and her only visit to the United States was as Bach’s guest in the early 1970s to see the newly-opened Lotte Berk Method studio.^[18]

• Lotte Berk Method of Exercise, Lotte Berk and Jean Prince, Quartet Books, 1979. ISBN 978-0704332188
• Lotte Berk Method, Lotte Berk, Natural Journeys, 2003. ISBN 978-1585659722
• Doctor Barre, Jill Rose Jacobs, PhD, 2022. ISBN 979-8419619074
• The True History of Barre and the Lotte Berk Method, Jill Rose Jacobs, PhD, 2025. ISBN 979-8262527083

• Esther Fairfax official website
• Doctor Barre official website
• Julie Welch, "Lotte Berk: Stylish dancer who became a fitness icon", The Guardian, 8 November 2003.
• The high barre: An investigation of barre for the performing arts in higher education by Jill Rose Jacobs – Queen's University Belfast