Studio director
Nadia Kellner
Explains the reason for everything, sometimes at more length than the class strictly needs. Will stop a room of twelve to fix one person's shoulder and make it feel like a group discovery rather than a correction.
Suits — People who are nervous, people who want to understand what they are doing rather than copy it, and anyone pregnant or postnatal.
she/her
Nadia opened Halcyon in 2016 with four reformers in a room above a bike shop on Picton Street, and moved into the current studio three years later when the lease came up.
She came to pilates the way a lot of people do, which is badly — a slipped disc at twenty-six, eighteen months of not really being able to sit down, and a physiotherapist in Bath called Jane Ellwood who eventually said “you should teach this.” She trained with BASI in London the following year while still working as a translator, which is a detail she thinks explains her teaching more than the certification does.
What she teaches
Foundations, Prenatal & Postnatal, and a Reformer Flow on Wednesday and Thursday mornings. She teaches almost every Foundations on the timetable because she thinks the first six weeks are the only part that is genuinely difficult to do well, and she is not willing to hand them to somebody else.
The pregnancy and injury enquiries
Every enquiry that comes through this website mentioning pregnancy or an injury is answered by Nadia personally, usually within a day, occasionally two. This is not a service promise so much as a decision — those are the questions where a wrong answer matters, and she would rather give them slowly herself than quickly through somebody else.
Outside the studio
Two children, one of whom was born nine weeks after she stopped teaching in her third pregnancy and is now old enough to be embarrassed about being mentioned here. Swims at Bristol Lido on Mondays. Reads more than she moves, which she is aware is funny.
The other three
Priya Raghunathan
Fast, precise, and cues with her voice rather than by demonstrating, so you learn to listen instead of watching the front of the room. Counts in a way people find unreasonably calming.
Ruth Ferreira
Asks more questions than she gives instructions. Will spend ten minutes of a fifty-five minute class finding out what your back actually does before anybody touches a spring, and considers that ten minutes the class.
Elin Sowerby
Loud, funny, and completely uninterested in whether the class looks elegant. Counts out loud, plays music at a volume the rest of the building can hear, and will absolutely notice if you have quietly taken a spring off.