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

SHOW TIMES AND DATES BELOW…

GO TO WWW.SUMMERWORKS.CA FOR TIX!!!

“What strikes me is the fact that, in our society, art has become something that is related only to objects and not to individuals or to life. That art is something which is specialized or done by experts who are artists. But couldn’t everyone’s life become a work of art? Why should… the lamp or the house be an art object…, but not our life?”

~Michel Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics”

(thanks to my collaborator Brendan Healy for making me aware of this quote)

(The following is my speech from Pride Prom, held at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, produced by the Triangle Program and SOY (Saving Our Youth). The Pride Prom is an annual prom in Toronto for LGBTQ and Questioning youth and their friends. It gives them a chance to come to a prom with same sex dates, be outrageously queer and there is a Prom Queen, King and Ace. The Ace is for anyone not comfortable identifying as a king or a queen.)

Thank you for having me here today. I want to welcome you all to Buddies in Bad Times Theatre. I believe that usually when we come to the theatre we come to watch characters onstage, people, have experiences and to watch them transform as they have experiences. And as we sit in the darkness in the audience, hopefully, we can let our hearts open. Maybe we let our hearts open just a little bit. And, if we let this happen it can be really quite amazing to watch people transform. It can also be very moving to realize that we are all on a journey that is unfolding in front of us. I think that is one of the things that makes the theatre a very magical place. When it lets us see that.

Tonight, I am very privileged that I get to speak to you at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre at the Pride Prom. As you graduate from high school. It’s my hope that you are enjoying the moments of this time in your life. Because this is a time of transition for you I expect it will also be a time of transformation for each of you. I encourage you to let your hearts open, just a little bit. You are witnessing everyone’s transformation and your own.

It can be very exciting to watch the Theatre of our Own Lives as it unfolds.

The Theatre of my Own Life has been very exciting for me.

I went to high school in a very small town in rural Ontario. When I was there I was a very effeminate person in a boy-body, and I hope things have changed in that small town for young queer people, and I know that they have.

One of the things that comes to my mind when I think back to my high school is that it was a kind of theatre, too. It was a very small high school so there were people watching other people’s lives unfold. In fact, we were all witnessing each other’s lives. Commenting about it. Talking about it. Getting caught up in the drama.

Sometimes people could say some very negative things about each other.

I did everything I could to perform well there. I performed very well in class. I was a “straight” A student. And, I performed very well after class in the drama club. I performed very well in our school’s production of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I liked performing very much, and I suppose I was known for it in my high school.

I also made sure to perform very well in the hallways, and in the cafeteria and after school. In between classes I made sure that I guarded my impulses and didn’t do anything inappropriate for my small town high school in the 80’s. Don’t be too effeminate. Don’t be too flamboyant. Don’t be too creative. Definately don’t be too creative. Don’t be sexual in any way around straight people. I performed that very well.

I wanted to be liked. I wanted to have friends and be accepted. So, I performed very well whenever other kids were watching me which was pretty much all the time in the Theatre of my High School. It was very challenging for me to always be performing, but it paid off because I got to survive.

But in a way I made an unspoken deal with some of the other people at my school. I would perform in certain ways and not in others ways if they would accept me. And they agreed to this agreement, too.

But once I made that unspoken deal with people they could be very critical of what I was performing and how I was performing. In fact, almost everyone was a critic. Everyone had an opinion.

Some people complained I was too artistic. Others said, “Why can’t you just let yourself be as artistic as you want to be?” Some said I was too unusual. Others said, “Why can’t you just embrace the fact that you are unusual. Most people said I was too effeminate. Others said, “Why can’t you just get over the fact that you’re effeminate and stop caring what other people think?” I was too proud. Not proud enough. Too forceful. Not forceful enough.

There was always something wrong with my performance. It was never good enough, and the criticism came form both sides.

Sometimes the most painful criticism of what I was doing was, “Why can’t you just be real? Why can’t you be the real you?”

It’s very hard to be real inside that kind of theatre. With an audience always judging.

(pause)

I always used to think that if I was famous everyone would accept me. Once I was famous people would really want to get to know the real me. I was really looking forward to being the real me. In a way, I wanted to perform the real me.

I don’t think that to perform is only to be fake. After all, we perform daily actions. We perform brushing our teeth. We perform carrying out the garbage. We perform actions. We perform saying hello.

Hello.

I do my best to perform as well as I can.

(pause) Yes, there´s more…. »

The interview is in two parts (below), and it’s about 20 minutes long. Cynthia Loyst and I chat about my transformations, straight men who are attracted to transsexuals and about my upcoming play I was Barbie at SummerWorks 2010. Brendan Healy, my director and the Artistic Director of Buddies in Bad Times Theatre joins us later in the interview, too!

The show originally aired on Friday, June 4th. Big thanks to Star Network and CP24 for having us on, and for supporting queer performance!

Special thanks to Michael Pihach for helping me create the image and to Dan Vernon for the poster design.

FYI-
PSi is a professional association founded in 1997 to promote communication and exchange between scholars and practitioners working in the field of performance. The organisation has staged numerous international conference and festival gatherings that have moved between the discourse and practice of performance. PSi conferences have been held across the U.S.A. and the U.K. and in Germany, New Zealand, Singapore, Denmark, and Croatia.

for more info check out their website http://psi16.com/

This performance is directed by Brendan Healy and dramaturged by Judith Rudakoff.

(from www.buddiesinbadtimes.com)

New Artistic Director Brendan Healy says: “When I accepted the position of Artistic Director, I was aware of the company’s important legacy and its need for renewal. As a queer artist, I identify with dissenters and mavericks. I have always considered myself an outsider, which affords me a perspective that is apart from mainstream ideals of beauty, art and love. I rebel against moral and cultural clichés around consumer-driven lifestyles, sexuality and identity politics. My vision for a queer theatre is one that embraces this outsider status in order to challenge established notions of morality, human relations, history and politics. In this age of cultural homogenization when difference is erased and divergence is feared, the queer point of view is more necessary than ever. This, my first official season, represents a bold reassertion of Buddies’ relevance as an artistic and political force in our city.”

Buddies’ proudly continues its commitment to new play development, gender parity and diversity with five works written by women, two by First Nations artists, five world premieres of original Canadian works, and the return of our ever-popular annual Rhubarb Festival with a new Festival Director, Laura Nanni.

Next season, Buddies will also extend its reach nationally with two of the company’s most successful recent productions embarking on cross-country tours. Both Agokwe and The Silicone Diaries will return to Buddies as they begin to travel the country with stops in Vancouver, Ottawa and Montreal.

And last, but not least, Buddies will open its doors to an international perspective with the English-Canadian premiere of a major queer work from abroad. Sarah Kane’s brilliant and controversial play Blasted will finally get a professional Canadian production, outside of Québec.

The 2010-11 Season engages with the broader world. It fearlessly tackles experiences of citizenship, racialization, religiosity, marginalization and social repression. It is a season that encompasses the full complexities of contemporary existence with quintessentially queer humour, intelligence and ferocity.

(photography by Tanja-Tiziana)

Very excited that my play The Silicone Diaries is being studied at another Canadian university.  It will be required reading in Sexuality and the Stage, a theatre course taught by reknowned playwright/director Sky Gilbert.  I will also be showing up (Nov 2, 2010) to speak in the class.

(The Silicone Diaries was dramaturged by Judith Rudakoff and directed by Brendan Healy.)

My play, i was Barbie, is going to be showing at SummerWorks (Aug 5-15th) this summer. I performed this play last year at the queer comedy festival, We’re Funny That Way, Buddies’ Pride Festival and at Queer Acts in Halifax. I am now considering these performances workshops.

I am working on a new draft of the script for this summer’s shows. Judith Rudakoff is working with me as dramaturg. This new production of i was Barbie will be directed by Buddies in Bad Times Artistic Director Brendan Healy.

I’m thrilled to be a part of SummerWorks this year as I have been an admirer of the festival of years.

(the following text from summerworks.ca)

ARTISTIC VISION
SummerWorks supports work that has a clear artistic vision and explores a specific theatrical aesthetic. It encourages risk, questions, and creative exploration while insisting on accessibility, integrity and professionalism. SummerWorks is the place where dedicated, professional artists are free to explore new territory and take artistic risks. Rather than getting larger, we strive to get better. We look to introduce professional artists from diverse communities to each other and be inspired by our similarities and differences.

photo by David Hawe

(this story –about Silicone Diaries director and Buddies in Bad Times Artistic Director Brendan Healy– originally appeared in the March 25th issue of Xtra!)

(by Gerald Hannon)

He’s the man who was once a gender-ambiguous little boy with fingernails painted blue (applied by his openly bisexual dad), a little boy who loved to play with dolls and dollhouses, who made those dolls part of an “insanely rich and detailed dynasty,” a little boy in a rough part of town who got beat up a lot, whose hippie parents split before he was born, who spent a lot of time alone, who had a rich imaginary life, who grew up bilingual in Montreal. That may not have added up to a “lovely, pastoral childhood,” as he puts it, but it does read like the perfect background for a career in the arts.

Today, Brendan Healy is the artistic director of Toronto’s Buddies in Bad Times Theatre. He’s only the fourth to hold that position in the company’s 31-year history, and he’s the youngest. That’s a description that makes him just a little uncharacteristically grumpy. “I’m fucking 34,” he says. “I’m not young. I know what I’m doing; I have life experience. I’m not some kid.” He’s no longer gender-ambiguous either, with his mildly caffeinated masculinity, his crisply ironed shirts and his conservative ties. Don’t let those externals fool you, though. He’s as queer as they come. Yes, there´s more…. »