I’ll be reading some new poetry. Also reading will be Adam Abbas, Corey Jensen, Kate DeJong and guests.
CO-PRODUCED BY BUDDIES IN BAD TIMES THEATRE
Tickets are available at www.thecultch.com or 604-251-1363.
The Cultch is located at 1895 Venerables Street, Vancouver.
The Silicone Diaries plays Feb 14-19, 21-25: 8PM. Single tickets from $21.
Post-show talkbacks: Feb 15, 16, 21, 22
“Beyond acceptable, beyond reasonable, Nina validates and celebrates choices that are mythic in proportion, and human in depth of feeling.” – Judith Rudakoff, Dramaturg
“Nothing last season was as totally memorable as Nina Arsenault’s self-revelatory portrait of a man who underwent countless surgeries to become the “perfect woman.” She’s back again and if you miss it this time, then you’re just being stupid.” – Toronto Star
**** (out of four) “profoundly moving” – Toronto Star
Most of the year’s work in review. Click on the thumbnails to see images and brief descriptions of the works and the works-in-progress.
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- Jan: I was Barbie, my one woman show about the night I was asked by Mattel to portray their loved plastic doll at her 50th birthday party, at the Yukon Arts Centre in Whitehorse
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- Jan: I Live, a workshop reading I performed, a fractured poetic text written by Nicholas Flood about his real life experiences as a former methamphetamine addict
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- Jan, Apr, Aug: Sodom, a monthly themed masquerade party -- I hosted Sodom, appeared on their posters, and also just enjoyed the event on other nights. I used the opportunity of shooting the nightclub posters to also create artistic portraits (which appear in the portraiture section of this site)
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- Feb: Liminoid, a series of photographs by myself and inkedKenny I revealed online (originally shot in 2008)
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- Feb: Transformation, a series of photographs by Bruce LaBruce and myself (the images had already appeared in several art journals and magazines internationally as well as being auctioned at Buddies in Bad Times' Art Attack, but hadn't been shown in Canada)
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- March: Landscape with Yukon and Unnatural Beauty, a collection of prose poems about my experiences performing and travelling in the Yukon (2010 and 2011), to be published in the volume TRANS(per)FORMING Nina Arsenault: an Unreasonable Body of Work, edited by Judith Rudakoff, to be published by Intellect Books in May 2012
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- Feb- Apr: Self-portraiture: identity, transformation and performance, an artist's talk and slide show I gave at 5 Canadian universities. My Jessica Rabbit impersonation is one of the slides.
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- March: Fey, photography by myself and Michael Chambers I revealed online (originally shot in 2010)
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- Aug: Acting Ladylike, being ladylike -- an essay about performing in Sky Gilbert's Ladylike, to be published in a book about Sky's work by Guernica Press in 2012
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- Feb: Surrealist Automaton --a photo portrait by Neil Mota and myself I reveald online (originally shot in Dec 2010, the morning after 18 consecutive performances of my play Th Silicone Diaries)
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- Apr: idol hands do the devil's, werqk!, a series of photo portraits made using my iMac photoshop.
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- June: The Female Form, Beauty and Art, a lecture given at the National Gallery of Canada. The first half of the lecture focused on representations and imagery of women produced across the globe and throughout time. The second half of the lecture focused on my collaborative portraiture. The lecture was presented to coincide with my play The Silicone Diaries at the Magnetic North Theatre Festival. My only involvement in the lecture was organizing the imagery for presentation.
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- Aug: Still Life Serving, a sculpture made from my former silicone implants (one ruptured), blood and video installation. The video elements of this piece have been shot, but not edited.
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- June: The Silicone Diaries, my one woman show performed at Magnetic North, Canada's National Festival of Contemporary Theatre in English
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- Aug: I started studying The Zohar, Kabbalah's 'Book of Splendors.' I study 30 - 45 minutes five days a week simply by listening to a live audio podcast. I've done this faithfully since August. It is enlightening and heart expanding.
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- Aug: Converge, a gathering of queer youth and the arts. I was the keynote speaker.
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- June: Award of Excellence in the Arts from the Canadian Civil Liberties Association
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- Sept: Manifesto of Living Self-portraiture, a document explaining my artistic process for the 150th anniversary issue of the Canadian Theatre Review, to be published Spring 2012
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- Aug: I Live, phase two of a project that began with a workshop reading in January. My own poetic pose writing, observations from an outsider who was witness to a series of gay methamphetamine orgies. I''ll be reading some of the poems at two poetry nights --Bill Bissett's Secret Handshake Club in January and at David Bateman's The Beautiful and the Damned in March. (exact dates coming soon)
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- Aug: Plane of Immanence, a short video made in collaboration with Jordan Tannahil, filmed in the unfinished re-construction site of Maple Leaf Gardens. The video has not been shown yet. There are also a series of photographs.
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- Oct: The Silicone Diaries is nominated for The Critics Prize by the Association of Quebec Theatre Critics. The show was nominated in the 'Outside Quebec' category for productions that come from other cities. The other two nominees were Potudo-ru (from Japan) and Hot Pepper, Air Conditioner, and the Farewell Speech (also from Japan).
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- Oct: Ophelia/Machine, a long form video I am writing and producing. Approximately one third of the footage of the video has been shot. This is a large project that will be in development for a few years.
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- Aug: Consciousness, Creativity and the Brain, a lecture by David Lynch which prompted me to explore transcendental meditation. The ful talk is available on youtube with a link in the 'Inspired by' section of this website.
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- Nov: The Art Game, an installation by Kent Monkman, at the Toronto International Art Fair. I performed inside the installation for two days.
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- Nov-Dec: a series of university talks culminating in Queer Art Diva, an evening of selected writing, monologues and visual art. I spoke at five Canadian universities in the fall semester.
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- Dec: Shade, a series of prose poems from my experiences as a gay nightlife hostess. I will be reading some of the poems at two poetry nights --Bill Bisset's Secret Handshake Club in Jan, and at David Bateman's The Beautiful and the Damned in March. (exact dates coming soon)
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- Dec: The Crime of Embellishment / The Book of Neoism, a continuing series paintings by Istvan Kantor a.k.a. Monty Cantsin Amen. My role in the creation of the paintings is that of the muse. In Istvan's words, he wanted to "paint the demons inside Nina."
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- Dec: The Crime of Embellishment / The Book of Neoism, a multi-stage project by myself and Istvan Kantor which includes photography, video and eventually live performance as well as paintings. This work will be in development through 2012. It is about the connections of ritual, representation, transformation, the unconscious and technology. It is also about shamelessness.
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- all year: vocal training with Fides Krucker. I've been training with mezzo soprano and voice teacher Fides Krucker. I'm using the training to learn how to find more emotion and authenticity as a performer. This is an on-going discipline that is very exciting work. Training the transsexual voice for more resonance and freer expressivity presents certain challenges. I hope to be able to write about this in the future. Eric Armstrong, voice teacher and York University Theatre Department Chair, observed me working with Fides and wrote about it in an article to be published in TRANS(per)FORMING Nina Arsenault: an Unreasonable Body of Work, to be published in May 2012 by Intellect Books.
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- Dec: Lilith, a new piece of visual art I created which I am not showing online because I want to show it in a gallery. It was made during a ritual performance which involved simultaneous self-flagellation. The video documentation of the making of the piece will be a part of the artwork in its installation form which will also include text, audio, hieroglyphics and photographic projections. (The above image is a ancient Mesopotamian carving which some scholars say is an image of the demon/ Goddess Lilith.)
These images were made from the Sodom posters I did in 2011. Sodom is a monthly nightclub night where people are encouraged to dress up in themed masquerades.
The images without the night club’s promotional text become kitsch, computer generated, surrealistic fantasies which were also simultaneously very real.
concepts: Nina Arsenault and Mitchel Raphael
photography: Mitchel Raphael
digital manipulation: Joey Wargachuk
make-up: Myles Sexton
What will 2012 hold for Toronto? Will we see more service cuts, higher property taxes and a playoff berth, maybe, for the Maple Leafs? We all have our own visions for the city, both what we like and what we’d like to see changed immediately. In the spirit of new beginnings and in the age-old tradition of starting over, we asked some of our favourite local personalities what resolutions they’d like the city to adopt in the new year.
***My resolution is below. To read what 15 other Canadians said -including filmmkaer Bruce LaBruce, city councillor Doug Ford and rapper Kardinal Offishall said check out: http://news.nationalpost.com/2011/12/31/be-it-resolved-resolutions-for-the-city-of-toronto-and-its-people/
Nina Arsenault (performance artist): “Everyone has to get as much breath into their bodies as possible through exercise, singing, athletics, yoga, meditation or whatever works for you. Having more breath will give you more empathy, more sensuality, more lightness, more brilliance, more outside-the-box thinking, more ferocity, more love, more libido, more stillness. You will have more life. Life will be more.”
painting: Deep Breath by Melanie Weidner 2005 www.ListenForJoy.com
I’ll be talking Jan 10th, 4pm to 6pm. The first hour is social with my talk programmed for the other hour.
I will be talking about the realities, the dangers and the complexities of silicone injections from the perspective of someone who has had them for ten years. Although I have covered this topic before in my play, The Silicone Diaries, this topic also merits a lengthy frank back-and-forth discussion outside of a conversation about art and artistic theory, particularly with youth in transition.
What is SOY?
Supporting Our Youth (SOY) is an exciting, dynamic community development program designed to improve the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual and transgendered youth in Toronto through the active involvement of youth and adult communities. We work to create healthy arts, culture and recreational spaces for young people; to provide supportive housing and employment opportunities; and to increase youth access to adult mentoring and support.
http://www.soytoronto.org/about.html
in Istvan’s words:
“inspired by [Nina's] possessive demons and all the pain, misery and crime that comes with it…”
The paintings are a part of an on-going multi-stage project that Istvan and I are working on together called The Crime of Embellishment / The Book of Neoism. I posted the earlier works (below as well as an artist’s bio of Istvan, as below, in a separate entry)
For purchase contact Istvan Kantor Monty Cantsin? Amen! use this email:
amen@interlog.com
CLICK ON THE THUMBNAILS TO SEE THE FULL IMAGES.
Like all of us I am a storyteller and an image maker. Except I am writing and imaging my life in the theatre, but in reality, too.
Because I’ve had the privilege of performing the same autobiographical play a number of times I could see how the play would shift during my training as a performer. The text was the same, but I was different because I had more life experiences, more acting experience but also because I have more breath in my body because of the training I have done with my voice teacher Fides Krucker.
Having more breath means the stories are rendered with more scope and scale.
Acting teachers and voice coaches know that it takes an actor more breath to perform Shakespeare or any kind of heightened poetic text. You can be as authentic as you want, but if you only have a small amount of breath in your body you will only be able to bring a small amount emotionally to the words which are poetic, not casual. Our emotional life exists on the breath. It is the breath.
But, theatrical genre isn’t just an aesthetic. It isn’t just a convention of form. IT IS A WAY OF EXPRESSING TRUTH. IT IS THE FORM OF EXPERIENCE.
This brings a question to the forefront of my practise as an artist.
We can write and live our lives with the vitality and scale of a sitcom. But could our lives be as expansive as the Greek plays? Shakespeare? Beckett? All these theatre makers were inscribing their truths. They weren’t just being theatrical.
If you are performers or not, I urge you to continue voice work, body work, breath work or if that doesn’t resonate with you then athletics or yoga or meditation, whatever you can do to get more breath into your body
To be inspired is literally to be filled with breath.
The more breath in your body means the more life in your body –> more sensation, more emotion, more awareness, more heart, more empathy, more sensuality, every moment becomes heightened.
from Monty’s mouth:
“Implant Media announces: THE CRIME OF EMBELLISHMENT –We (and Istvan Kantor Monty Cantsin? Amen!) started a major project with Nina Arsenault, Neoist transsexual criminal, android creature, cyber model, body reconstructionist, performance artist, shape shifter…that will feature Nina as the embodiment of Neoism, goddess of contemporary mythology,a cyber diva of Neoist propaganda reaching out without limits of communication,…
pls look up her site for more introduction where you’ll also find information about my new paintings inspired by Nina’s plastic surgery campaign, available for sale in order to cover production costs of “Crime of Embellishment” (the video)
ISTVAN KANTOR A.K.A. MONTY CANTSIN? AMEN!
BIO
Istvan Kantor was born in Budapest where he studied medical science. In 1976 he defected to Paris and from there he immigrated to Montreal. He also lived in Portland, New York, Berlin and presently is a resident of Toronto where his three children, Jericho, Babylon and Nineveh were born in the 90’s.
His main subjects are the decay of technology and the struggle of the individual in technological society. His work has been described by the media as intellectually rebellious, anti-authoritarian, as well as technically innovative and highly experimental. He likes to break things and set things on fire. He uses conflict and crisis to present his cause, often placing himself in the center of danger and uncertainty. His radically changing creative ambitions are always related to his living environment and social situation.
Throughout the past three decades he has been arrested and jailed many times for his guerilla interventions in museums. He also received many prestigious awards among them the Telefilm Canada Award for Best Canadian Film and Video in 1998, the Transmediale Award in 2001, in Berlin, the Governor General’s Award for Visual and Media Arts in 2004, in Canada, and the EMAF 2009 Award at the European Media Art Festival in Osnabruck, Germany.
Here’s some photos of Monty Cantsin – performance documentation, Neoist propaganda, self-portraits.
