
FKA twigs Hosts 'The Body Is Art' Movement Workshop With On
By Justin Moran
Jan 23, 2025It’s Sunday morning in Downtown Manhattan and FKA twigs is challenging us to stretch our ribs in ways we’ve yet to discover within our own bodies. The room is full of people on all fours, slowly switching between cat-cow stretches, as the artist guides us through various movements on stage. While warming up, she encourages us to reframe that burning sensation as “hot honey” flowing, before a brief pause to check in with everyone: “Your hips should feel juicy,” she smiles, her voice soft and comforting. They do.
This exercise is part of Twigs’ album rollout for Eusexua and an extension of her partnership with On that sees the 37-year-old performer bringing “The Body Is Art” campaign to life through a day-long training workshop. She’s teaching us The Eleven, a series of physical techniques that Twigs developed as a means to self-healing and better understanding ourselves. Gathered overlooking the New York skyline, this group is special: a real mix of creatives (DJs, dancers, stylists, artists) all arriving with different levels of ability, but eager to learn directly from Twigs.
She has curated the day’s lineup in collaboration with On, inspired by her new musical era and personal wellness routines. Professional body builder Shelly Mensah continues our journey with a more fitness-focused activity that has guests doing the splits and backbends to varying degrees of success. Later, Twigs’ choreographer James Vu Anh Pham teaches us all a section from her “Striptease” music video, which helped work up an appetite for our healthy lunch courtesy of Medical Practitioner Jemma Mayo.
“I think it’s really amazing to be able to embody your intentions,” Twigs says when we reconvene for the workshop’s final chapter. After rubbing our bodies all over for 11 minutes uninterrupted, an exercise from The Eleven that Twigs calls “Croning,” we move onto something she has labeled “Minestate,” inviting everyone to individually find something we love about ourselves. “As soon as you think you’ve found it, go deeper,” she advises, as the room writhes with eyes closed. “Go deeper,” she repeats. This extreme meditation ends in total stillness, as Tom Wilson Leonard closes the day with a powerful sound bath that moves some to tears.
Before our workout, PAPER caught up with FKA twigs in her green room to talk about Eusexua, The Eleven and the importance of subculture.
There's a lot of people getting ready upstairs. Have you ever taught this big of a group before?
Actually, yes. I used to be a youth worker. That was my whole job: to teach people music and dancing, and we did poetry and big workshops.
So this is full circle, in some ways?
I guess so, in some ways. I used to work with a lot of refugees in my early twenties. That was my job.
That’s amazing. So I've been to three different Eusexua-related events this year: your Met Gala after party, where you teased some songs, then an album listening session and your Chocolate Factory rave in Brooklyn. It's been cool to watch this era unfold.
Wow! What’s it feel like?
It feels like real community building with a more focused effort to create space for a specific group — like not everyone is invited. Does that resonate with what you've set out to do?
Everyone is definitely invited, but naturally, as an artist, I garner a certain crowd. And that crowd has supported me from the beginning. I really believe in community, and I really believe in subcultures. Community and subculture has raised me and saved me. I always love to be able to honor those people that have been there for me from the beginning, or new like-minded people every time I come out and do something, because those subcultures have been my family. So I like to give back in any way that I can, and create special moments and memories and have people meet each other.
I've always said that I struggle with the word “fans,” because it's not really exactly the way I see it. I think it's a community where like-minded individuals can come together and make connections artistically, emotionally, spiritually, through music, art and experience. I think we're at quite an exciting time, because if I look at artists like Queen or Madonna or Grace Jones, artists that have really pushed for something in society, whether that's a certain marginalized community or people that don't necessarily have a voice... Back in the ’80s and ’90s, I felt like there was so much work to be done. When I first came out as an artist, it felt like the doors opened a bit and it felt a bit more free. Everyone was learning a lot more and being more tolerant of each other. It felt like a very beautiful time.
But for me as an artist, there's also less to push against, because things felt like they were naturally opening up. Whereas now, for 10 years I've been doing this, at this point it really feels like it needs artists to be true to their community again to open up doors. So I feel in a very privileged position to be able to help bring these people together and help create safe spaces and electric spaces and wild spaces where people can truly be themselves. When I started to become bigger, I never thought in those years that it would need that again. Yet here we are, which isn't great, but I feel grateful to be able to create an environment where subcultures are respected.
Respected and there, because now there's this extreme flattening of everything and everyone has access to anything. We're all seeing the same content. Maybe that's what was so cool about being at, specifically your Chocolate Factory party, because it felt like you were forcing a subculture to convene and create a physical experience. Whereas, it can often feel like subcultures no longer exist at all.
Obviously, the internet has had a big part in that. I grew up in the era of Santos and GHE20G0TH1K, and, for me, when I came through Venus X was my hero. She was an absolute goddess, and I saw what she did, creating a safe space for community. I saw the tangible impact that it had on so many artists. Even artists like Rihanna at the time, whether she knew that's where it came from or not, that style was a direct impact of the club kids that were going out to GHE20G0TH1K.
I had never seen anything like that before. When I stepped in those spaces, I immediately felt, as a young Brown girl, I belong here. Like, This is my space where I can truly be myself. I can test out ideas. I can test out my art. I can find collaborators. So when I'm trying to create these raves and these nights and these experiences, I'm really doing it with Santos and GHE20G0TH1K and Venus X in my heart of trying to find the purest experience for everyone as possible. And it's hard. Obviously, the bigger you get as an artist, the more there is to pick out and pull apart, but within my heart I have the purest intentions, because this is what raised me. Now I'm the generation that can help kick the door down–
For other generations that haven’t experienced what you have, because it’s very different to experience culture on a phone than to physically be in a space meeting people
But you know, it looks and feels the same, honestly. Like being at the Chocolate Factory rave, it looks and feels the same as the nights which brought me to life in Berlin and London and New York in my early twenties.
Same, that's why it was exciting. I was like, Okay, here are the looks.
[Laughs] Thank god.
Bring back the looks! I'm curious how you feel wellness and the body in the context of what we're doing today with On fits into Eusexua and this world you're building,
I inherently have always had an issue with the word “wellness.” I haven't exactly invented 100% new phrases yet to explain my approach towards it, but I think that there is a world in which one can be living in the city, going out partying, meeting a lot of people, living in some ways quite a harsh life, but still be completely devoted to their vessel. So that's when I started to talk about the phrase, “The Body Is Art,” and meeting with On and bringing this concept forward to them. I feel there's a way in which people can be so dialed into their vessels and their physicality and their body, and they can take that power out into the city, into their job, into their force, into their purpose. I know that's what I do. I like living a very harsh life.
Yeah, same [laughs]. I’m always like, Does balance really exist? Do you have to fully commit to being healthy? I was dancing at Paragon in Brooklyn until 3 AM last night, and here I am today for this workshop. Do you believe in balance or are you more someone of extremes?
I believe in balance, but I can go to extremes in both ways. Sometimes I will lock it down and I'm so on my food and I'm into my body, and then other times I don't sleep and I party and I go out. Sometimes I do burn the candle at both ends, but I know in my body when it's going too far. I can check in with myself and I can say, Okay, I need to do something else in the other direction. But I struggle a bit with “wellness,” because I feel like it's a tiny bit elitist. I like to create things for myself that I can do at home, that I can do in a hotel room, that I can do with friends. Some of my closest movement partners, we get together and we stretch and we hang out and we gossip, but we do it on yoga mats in my house and we just stretch it out.
That's something that I've always loved about the dance community. The dancers that I'm working with now, in particular, we roll around on the floor, we're hugging each other, we're in splits, we're doing exercises. It's so nourishing to be able to find like-minded individuals to move with, especially coming off the back of a period like COVID, where we had to find our own agency and discipline in isolation. It's so nice now that we can be together. Sometimes it feels naughty and dangerous, in a way, to find people and meet up and stretch and go to the club. One of the raves in London, all the dancers came around my house and we got ready together, and I was stretching on the floor and having a little drink, and then we went out together and we danced all night. And the next day, we're in rehearsals on the ballet bar again. It feels like a scene from a movie.
It’s very unique to the dance community, that extreme discipline. Where do you find yourself in-between the discipline that's needed as an artist for dancing and rehearsing, but then also allowing yourself total creative freedom and fuckery.
It's very intuitive with me. I'm very delved into my body, but that's because I use it every single day. I like to feel very youthful, and I feel like I'm just getting younger and younger. I just turned 37 the other day, and I literally feel like I’m 23.
I just turned 30 and I feel like I'm 85.
[Laughs] I just feel like a baby and my body feels better than it ever felt in many ways. I'm really into body conditioning and eating well, and if I am not eating well, it feels so fun. Because I always think there's a component of diet that people don't talk about, which is joy. And actually, Jemma [Mayo], who's here today working on the nutrition, I first became friends with her like six years ago now. She is so disciplined with her diet. I remember we were in my living room one time talking about how she's a bit younger than me, and I was like, Sometimes do you not just want to eat joy? Sometimes joy does taste like kale and other times joy tastes like a chocolate cake or some fried food. And she was like, I don't get it. And then we were hanging out the other day, and she was like, I completely get it now, the element of joy within a diet, but to be able to have that agency and that control and that freedom, but still honoring your body and knowing when you need to rein it in.
Sometimes I am like, No drinking, celery juice in the morning, only complex carbs, I have to go to gym every day. I can be hardcore. I'll get in from a flight at 11 at night and if there's a 24-hour gym, I'm down in the gym on the running machine if that's what I need to do. And other times I love to go to the studio and then go straight to a rave and take all my friends out. Sometimes I can push it so hard. I’m a Capricorn, so you take us out and we'll really run the show. But that's what I mean, I don't believe in extreme anything. It's just a balance. And you know yourself, when you can have fun or when you need to dial it in. You know when it's game time.
But you have to be really in tune with your body and your mind to be able to do that, which maybe some people aren't?
Yeah, for sure. When I was working on Eusexua, I developed an 11-step movement method, called The Eleven, and it basically focuses your attention onto 11 pillars of your life. So that could be your environment, your friends, your relationship with the internet, time spent alone to self-develop. They all have different names, like “Minestate” is your own meditative time. So say, for example, I was noticing that I was getting really angry whilst waiting in a queue, I would say that I need to work on my patience and figure out why I feel like that. Sure, you can have loads of therapy, but actually if you just sit alone and write a little bit, or think about it on a Friday night, you’d probably get to the bottom of why that is.
And faster.
Faster and less expensive, do you know what I mean? [Laughs] But I think there's an element of self-growth, which is very solitary. Or at least I’ve found that. I mean, it's great to have a bit of help along the way, but I think a lot of it can be done through thinking and finding time to focus. You know yourself better than anyone else, ultimately.
And there's Croning [in The Eleven], which is an obsession with technology. Croning from [David] Cronenberg, he's got all these fleshy gadgets, right? Sometimes your phone is attached to your hand, so Croning involves these movements that I put with each concept, and then you can check in with yourself. You can do the movement for 11 minutes in the morning and it's like self-meditation, but you can work on your own mantra. That helps me check in with myself. I invented it for everybody to have and I’ll be doing seminars around that when I go on tour.
Sometimes the scariest thing is sitting alone with your thoughts, but that's when the real growth and development happens.
Totally.
Photos courtesy of On
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