(the following review excerpted from www.torontoist.com.)

Transgendered performer Nina Arsenault, who’s undergone sixty plastic surgeries to attain an idealized female body, seized the role of a lifetime when she was offered the chance to personify Mattel’s Barbie for the doll’s fiftieth anniversary party, during Fashion Week 2009. Arsenault’s description of the surreal night she spent mingling (as Barbie) with fashion and celebrity elites is devastatingly candid as she describes floating through the evening in a haze of wish fulfillment and Ativan tranquilizers, dealing with ego bruising and eye-opening encounters (most notably with TV personality Ben Mulroney, whom she implies has disappeared into his Ken doll–like shell). The highlights of the show are her observations of how partygoers reacted when she approached them and offered them cupcakes: a potentially humiliating experience that Arsenault subverts into a rapturously spiritual one—the baked treats almost become pop culture communion wafers. The most revealing moment is when she sits on the floor, becoming truly vulnerable for the first time, and we realize what a prodigious effort has gone into maintaining the various doll-inspired poses she’s been striking. SF

Cut and paste the following link to read all of their reviews

http://torontoist.com/2010/08/your_cheat_sheet_to_summerworks_2010.php#barbie

(the following review is excerpted from Ms. Slotkin’s radio coverage of the Summerworks theatre festival.)

“Ms. Arsenault is fascinating… The show is full of caustic wit, perception, barbed observations… I love being unsettled by Ms. Arsenault as she is a woman who idealizes a plastic creation but wants to be taken seriously as a human being, as a living person… one of my recommendations.”

To hear Ms. Slotkin’s full coverage of Summerworks cut and paste the following link:

http://www.lynnslotkin.com/radioreviews.html

(the following text is excerpted from Nestruck’s larger review of the Summerworks festival.)

I was also enthralled by transgendered actor Nina Arsenault’s I Was Barbie, her true story about playing the famous doll at a gala in the toy’s honour held in Toronto. Through a haze of Ativan and champagne, she gives us a penetrating peek behind the scenes at a party full of models, fashion journalists, rappers and Ben Mulroney – it’s gonzo journalism that would make Hunter S. Thompson proud.

to read the entire article cut and paste the link:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/theatre/nestruck-on-theatre/turn-your-attention-away-from-homegrown-at-summerworks/article1671512/

Hunter S. Thompson

You Can Tell It’s Mattel. It’s Swell!
(by Amanda Campbell)

Nina Arsenault, “boy, girl, man, woman, performance artist, academic, educator, reality TV star, stripper, whore, columnist, nightlife hostess, storyteller, aesthete, art object, cyborg, icon, Barbie” is a fascinating human being and, in her newest work i was BARBIE, currently playing at the Theatre Passe Muraille Backspace as part of the 2010 SummerWorks Festival, she is an immediately captivating performing subject. In this one woman show Arsenault speaks about her stint playing Barbie at Canadian Fashion Week for the debut of a new Barbie-inspired fashion line in celebration of the iconic doll’s 50th Birthday.

As Arsenault says at the beginning of the piece, the irony of Mattel considering a transgendered performance artist who has become renowned for her ability to transform herself from a seemingly masculine body into a gorgeous and unique work of art is intense to say the least. She also mentions, of course, how ironically appropriate it seemed to her that an individual who has spent thousands of dollars on plastic surgery and who has significant portions of her body created entirely out of silicone, should be chosen to represent a doll who has been accused of “fucking up the body image” of generations worth of women for the past fifty years. And yet, what is perhaps even more fascinating is that the event during Fashion Week, at least on the surface, swept all satire or paradox under the PMS 219 Barbie Pink carpet.

Arsenault is an extremely intellectual artist, and the programme for i was BARBIE is filled with fascinating academic insights with dramaturg Judith Rudakoff into performing identity, the nature of art, beauty and gender and the way that our media and our society constructs gender norms and the way that corporations like Mattel and artists like Andy Warhol, use iconography to perpetuate certain ideals of femininity, beauty and perfection. Yet, the play itself is more subtle in its analysis of this experience, and allows the audience to choose for themselves how deep they would like to delve into the complex issues of gender and identity that Arsenault is weaving. In the programme she says of her writing of this show that “there are stream of consciousness elements in the writing. It moves from a rampant analysis of the things that are happening around me, to a moment of internal reflection about sensation, about something I’m actually feeling in my body.” To truly inhabit Barbie, Arsenault reflects, it is her job for this evening to be vacant (courtesy of Ativan), to be plastic and to be perfect.

While keeping herself poised as the representation of a doll whose image is nearly as complex as her own, Arsenault manages to paint a vivid picture of this event, which is rich in its detail and yet always accessible even to those who didn’t know that Toronto had its own Fashion Week. She mostly takes the audience into her own mind, her own heart and into her breath, which she strives to keep down in her genitals the way her voice teacher advocates, all the while she simultaneously represses and embraces the very real feelings of fear and insecurity that inevitably rise and subside throughout the evening. Yet, she also inhabits a few other individuals instrumental to her journey to Barbie to hilarious effect, as each one is more extreme in her ability to precisely inhabit the Hollywood culture than the last.

There is so much fascinating intellectual territory crammed into this piece that the feminist in me could write an entire paper delving into the subtext of each moment from the way that Arsenault carries herself, the dainty way she holds her wrists and insists on having her hair cover one of her eyes to her allusions to Ghandi, Buddha, Jesus Christ, Michelle Obama and the pink plastic temple of patriarchy, with Barbie as the highest priestess and, most interesting of all, Arsenault’s ability to simultaneously revel within this world, as even her own body, and certainly her deft mind, both celebrates, subverts and rejects everything that Barbie typically stands for.

Director Brendan Healy largely allows Nina Arsenault to be the focus of this piece, both as the storyteller, but also as a Barbie, a gorgeous, perfectly sculptured representation of the female body clad in a silver sequin dress and incredibly high stiletto shoes. She creates art and is the artwork, although there are also projected photos from the event, with Perez Hilton styled captions, as well as commercials for Barbie inter-spliced throughout as well as a good use of the camera shutter, as Arsenault speaks thoughtfully about the mechanics of modelling as a public figure, and musing what her genuine emotions, a feeling like empathy for example, would look like on camera if it accidentally permeated through her meticulously posed facade.

At the heart of i was BARBIE, is that even though Nina Arsenault, like Barbie, can easily spark a discussion about artificiality, as Judith Rudakoff writes, “is Nina a reproduction, a representation, a reflection or a reinterpretations? Perhaps a regeneration? A reinvention?,” as Barbie can change her clothes and reconfigure her image, just as real woman are able to do in the world of Plastic Surgery and Self-Help gurus, ultimately what is inside, the raw emotions, and the heart remain. And what makes i was BARBIE so beautiful is that it is filled with both.

to read their other great reviews cut and paste the link:

http://www.twisitheatreblog.com/search?updated-max=2010-08-10T19%3A51%3A00-03%3A00&max-results=7

(by Jen Handley, originally published at www.mondomagazine.net)

“I consider my body the result of a long creative process,” says the disarmingly frank Nina Arsenault, a transgendered artist and the star of I was Barbie, which begins its SummerWorks run on Thursday. “I’ve made a lot of design choices about by body. I made choices to make it look not at all like a body anymore. I sort of pushed the female form to a level of abstraction.”

Arsenault, whose transformation involved over sixty plastic surgeries, is gorgeous, but unmistakably larger than life. Her impossibly tall and slender frame, high cheekbones, even skin, and perfectly sculpted blonde hairdo, each look a like a pointed exaggeration of a feminine ideal: she looks very much like a human Barbie.

“I think at first I just wanted to be a woman,” says Arsenault. “But because of the way my body looked already, as a male, I couldn’t just look like a normal female. I could either look like a transgendered woman and still have male features, or I could push the surgical procedures in such a way as to eliminate the male features, but that would make me look plastic. And that’s what I chose.”

Her show, which she describes as “a spiritual portrait of a plastic world,” that is, Toronto fashion week on Barbie’s 50th birthday, where Arsenault represented the doll, attempts to sort out “real” from “fake” in contemporary culture. While Arsenault glibly describes herself as “a transsexual cyborg,” she points out that most people aren’t as real as they might think they are.

“I would say that everyone living in modern culture pretty much is a cyborg,” says Arsenault, adding with a laugh, “it may not be completely obvious yet.”

“All of us are exposed to social conditioning through technology. Social conditioning in the media, on TV, in the newspaper, informs our desire. It tells us who we want to be… we all have images of success, fake images that we’re trying to fulfill. And that’s what I call a cyborg.”

And as a fake image we try to fulfill, no one has taken more feminist flack over the years than Barbie. “I have very deep respect for Barbie as an icon, but I have very conflicted feelings about her,” says Arsenault. “I loved Barbie as a child, and, you know, wanted to be her. I was little girl inside a little boy’s body, and she was the perfect beauty.” But Arsenault also experienced some of Barbie’s trademark infliction of feelings of inadequacy. “I was a guy, my body was so radically different from hers.”

After experimenting with many styles since its first run last year, Arsenault, director Brendan Healy and dramaturge Judith Rudakoff have found an approach for the show that addresses the complex relationship Barbie has with her admirers. “I wanted it to be stylish and slick, but also self-deprecating, and reference some of the suffering that Barbie brings upon people, but also laugh at that, too.”

Arsenault’s interest in the difference between real and fake extends to her creative approach. She starts with an exciting experience, not a political thesis. “I don’t create art, from the beginning, to make the world a better place. I think [my work] is political, and it does create discussion. That is important. But the starting point is much more visceral.”

“I sometimes feel like people create art because they want to create social change… and it’s so one-noted, it’s so obvious, that I don’t really believe it, I’m like, ‘the world is far more complex than that.’ Or I’ll go to see a play and the theme of the play is, like, ‘The Internet and Facebooking are bad.’ And everyone claps at the end, and everyone leaves the theatre, and no one believes it. But I think if you start from all of the stuff that you’re obsessed with, and then you start structuring it later, you get a much more complicated picture of humanity. To me that’s real art.”

(originally printed in the Toronto Star Aug 7th. This review is excerpted from a series of three reviews of Summerworks shows)

I Was Barbie

Highly Recommended

Created and performed by Nina Arsenault. Directed by Brendan Healy. Until Aug. 15 at Theatre Passe Muraille Backspace, 16 Ryerson Ave. 416-504-7529.

There’s another kind of madness on display from Nina Arsenault in her latest dispatch from the front ranks of the transgendered wars, which she calls I Was Barbie.

Arsenault, you may recall, is the former York University acting teacher named Rodney who underwent 60 separate plastic surgeries to turn into the modern Circe of amorphous sexuality that she is today. Her story of that event, The Silicone Diaries, was one of the major events of last season and is scheduled to be revived at Buddies in Bad Times this fall.

I Was Barbie, however, shows Arsenault in a different mode. She has only one story to tell: about how she played Barbie during 2009’s Toronto Fashion Week to celebrate the plastic plaything’s 50th birthday.

Arsenault’s search for the perfect female face and body at all costs makes her arrival as Barbie that night a kind of journey to the peak of the K2 of a certain kind of gender reality, and she savours the moment with all of its ironies.

She wafts through the night on a cloud of Ativan, but it doesn’t dull her razor-sharp perceptions. She’s devastating about the alcohol-fueled performance of Fashion Week head Robin Kay and equally cutting (in a you-don’t-feel-the-pain-you-just-see-the-blood way) eviscerating Ben Mulroney, all but declaring him the perfect Ken to her Barbie.

But although she names names and juliennes reputations, she also turns the high beams on her own persona, sending herself up as “a kind of high-maintenance Gandhi.”

When she decides that the phalanx of “young men I knew from the clubs” who now show up dressed in black and wearing microphone headsets makes the evening look “the gayest episode of Battlestar Galactica ever,” you have no choice but to succumb in laughter.

Arsenault is a sphinx with many secrets. You can’t take her eyes off her when she’s on stage, which is one sure definition of stardom.

She’s still haunted by the erratic way she often links things together that slightly hazed the glory of The Silicone Diaries. Is Arsenault searching for her lines, puzzling over the right tone, or still working through the Ativan?

No matter, it’s another piece of must-see Summerworks viewing.

Cut and paste the following link to read the other reviews:

http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/theatre/article/845151–portrait-of-jealousy-a-summerworks-winner

Q&A: Nina Arsenault
Writer/performer, I Was Barbie
By Jordan Bimm

(originally printed in the Aug5th, 2010 issue of NOW Magazine, go to www.nowtoronto.com)

In last year’s The Silicone Diaries, Nina Arsenault relived and reflected on her transformation from male to female. Addicted to plastic surgery, Arsenault endured over 60 operations – many performed under horrifically sketchy circumstances – to become the woman she is today.

She developed her new show, I Was Barbie, in parallel with Diaries, and it features the same production team. This time Arsenault recounts the glitzy night she spent portraying Barbie at a high-profile fashion event celebrating the famous doll’s 50th anniversary, showing how fantastic a life in plastic really is.

What was your relationship with Barbie growing up?

All the girls in my neighbourhood had Barbies. Because I was in a boy-body, it was nearly blasphemous to even touch one. I could only stare at them. That’s how I interacted with Barbie, through distant viewing sessions.

What did you learn about Barbie while working on this show?

The power of Barbie as an icon amazed me. She can take people back to childhood feelings or still inspire anger in adults. As a representation, she seems to have all the power of a mystic symbol with the drive of big business behind her.

One of the most common criticisms of Barbie dolls is that they promote a body type that’s unattainable. But you’re living proof that our bodies are malleable. Has plastic surgery made the Barbie body attainable? Is this a good thing?

In the historical evolution of human bodies, there’s never been such a profound wave of transformation. Large sections of the population [are using technology to change themselves]. It doesn’t surprise me that this new technological mutation is tied so intimately to sexual desirability. But ultimately, plastic surgery alone can’t make someone into a living Barbie. It also takes youth and intense dieting. Her image is not, however, “unattainable.” It is attainable, but only through suffering and only for a time.

Would the world be a better place without Barbie?

If Mattel hadn’t invented Barbie, someone else would have. People have been drawn to idealized forms of the female body since prehistory. Even early fertility symbols that emphasized girth and roundness in the female form were abstract and impossible to achieve. The Greeks also loved idealized bodies. I see Barbie as a commodified version of the same impulse – a totem for our times, Aphrodite melted into hollow plastic, mass produced and mass marketed.

Was there a Ken on hand for you to hang out with?

He was just a digital video projection. But then again, aren’t a lot of us?

Your last play featured a hilarious story about getting hit on by Tommy Lee. Do any celebrities turn up in this show?
I was very much taken with encountering Ben Mulroney.

Nina Arsenault goes from Dungeons and Dragons to playing Barbie

(by Chris Dupuis)

Though it’s unlikely you’ll ever find yourself in a game of Dungeons and Dragons with Nina Arsenault, if you do, make sure you don’t break character.

“I’ve always taken performance very seriously,” laughs Arsenault. “Even during my brief flirtation with DnD in high school, I always insisted people stay in character for the whole game.”

Arsenault always played high-priestess characters.

“The evil priestess was my favourite,” she says. “She was shockingly beautiful, dressed always in black robes and had very powerful spells. But she also had a healing quality and was worthy of redemption in the end.”

Our discussion of the ultimate nerd pastime has come up in talking about Arsenault’s SummerWorks show I W@s B*rbie, which is based on the transsexual writer/performer’s real-life experience of being asked to play Barbie at the Mattel Corporation’s 50th birthday party for the much loved (and hated) doll.

When she talks in the script about arriving at Fashion Week, Arsenault delivers the poignant line, “I am on a pilgrimage into the pink plastic temple of patriarchy, and like it or not, I am its highest priestess,” which has led us to a discussion of her previous roles as “Priestess,” as well as the subject of patriarchy.

Not surprisingly, Arsenault has even more to say about the latter subject.

“I don’t think patriarchy is evil. I just think it’s very complicated,” she says. “From my own marginalized place in culture, I have seen how all systems of political thought exclude, discriminate, and dehumanize.”“

“As a transsexual who has altered my body to be happy, I have faced discrimination from conservatives for being sexually deviant,” she adds. “But I have also faced an enormous amount of discrimination from left wingers who look at my augmented body and immediately judge me as superficial and a symbol of body fascism, as emblematic of the oppression of women.”

In earlier versions of the show, Arsenault referenced her experiences of playing with Barbie as a child but ended up cutting that part of the script.

“I didn’t want to give people the impression that my choice to play Barbie was some altruistic act of saving my inner child,” she says. “The decision was much more complicated than that. I was looking at it as an interesting performance project in and of itself, as well as a way to explore how my desires and dreams, like everyone else’s, were constructed for me at a young age by companies like Mattel and the institution of Hollywood.”

Perhaps more than anything else, I W@s B*rbie is a play about real versus fake.

“People use the term ‘real’ as a way to put people down, as in ‘Oh honey, she ain’t real,’” Arsenault says. “It’s often used as a way to attack anyone who is creative or different. But seriously, if you look and act just like everyone else, chances are you’re the one who’s not real.”

The topic of real and fake invariably brings up the much-discussed surgical procedures Arsenault underwent as part of her transition.

“Anytime I make a statement about anything, people always want to relate it back to the surgeries,” she says. “I don’t think it’s fair to frame me as an artist that way. There are other things I want to explore in my work now.”

If people want to catch a glimpse of the real Arsenault, the best way is to see her perform.

“I am the most real when I am on stage,” she says. “Because I am a storyteller more than an actor, my job is to reveal myself to the audience. The more authentic nuances I can reveal in my performance, the more chance there is of someone in the audience saying, ‘How did she know that about me?’”

I w@s B*rbie plays at SummerWorks from Aug 5-15.