The Secret Life of Gym Girls

Overview

Anna Azizzy’s “The Secret Life of Gym Girls” is an absurd and hilarious multimedia performance depicting a fictional gymnastics team, their coach, and moms. The characters’ experiences exaggerate the artist’s as a former gymnast and queer person. Azizzy reimagines their team’s stories, giving them secrets and exposing their most shameful (queer and unusual) desires.

The piece combines tactile elements of the gymnastics gym with the homogeneity of a digital world, emphasizing the jarring differences between the characters’ upbeat shared lives and the secrets they struggle to keep closeted. Physical set pieces that double as gymnastics apparatuses flow seamlessly into projected backgrounds. Azizzy shares the stage with a cast of digital characters, filmed on greenscreen, allowing them to play all the roles at once and enabling the characters to perform animated, exaggerated feats of strength and skill.

About the Artist

Anna Azizzy is a Pittsburgh artist reimagining their past and creating their queer future through performance. By exaggerating their own desire / shame, Azizzy discovers who they wish to become, soothes the shame of being, and celebrates the queerness that is so joyful to live. Azizzy’s practice spans many mediums, including performance art, video art, experimental music, carpentry, and sculpture. Their work is wonky and faulty, but brimming with heart and bursting with laughter.

Azizzy earned their BA in Experimental Theater and Sculptural Performance at Carnegie Mellon University in 2017. They have since shown work at a great number of spaces across North America, including The Andy Warhol Museum, Carnegie Museum of Art, Cleveland Museum of Contemporary Art, The New Hazlett Theater, Monkey Town Mexico City, and The Charlotte Street Foundation. When they are not making art, Azizzy works as a handyman and carpenter in Pittsburgh.

Credits