Yoga for Larger Bodies is a documentary animation telling the story of one yoga teacher’s experience of teaching, and living in, a larger body. It’s the origin story of one of London’s few yoga classes created specifically for larger-bodied people, a warm account of building a space where every kind of health, mental, physical and social, is valued equally.

The entire animation, and every image within it, is drawn as one single, continuous line. That choice echoes the themes of union, meditation and connection at the heart of the story and the practice, the whole film literally unbroken from start to finish. Finding a visual idea that embodies a story’s meaning, rather than just illustrating it, is the kind of thing I care most about in my documentary work.

The film is a collaboration with its narrator, yoga teacher and artist Janice Kate (they/them), founder of Light Yoga Space, whose own chanting, used to open and close their yoga sessions, forms the soundtrack and gives the animation its meditative structure. Light Yoga Space began in an East London warehouse studio and continues today as an online practice welcoming fat, queer, disabled, neurodivergent and otherwise “othered” bodies into yoga.

This is one of the self-directed pieces I make as part of my ongoing Fat Experience Project, a body of documentary animation built from people’s real stories about living in larger bodies. It sits alongside related work like my Flying While Fat documentary animation. These personal, experimental projects are where I get to play the most with form and feeling, and they sit at the heart of my wider animation work.

If you’re an individual, organisation or researcher with a personal or lived-experience story around the body, health or belonging, and you’d like to bring it to life through documentary animation, I’d love to hear from you. Get in touch.