Buddies in Bad Times Artistic Director and Silicone Diaries director Brendan Healy is going to be working with me again, directing a new revised production I Was Barbie. The new production will show this summer at multiple venues. I will post more details when I can….
Last summer I Was Barbie played to sold out houses and standing ovations at We’re Funny That Way, the queer comedy festival, Buddies in Bad Times Pride Festival and Halifax’s Queer Acts festival.
a video trailer for my one woman play The Silicone Diaries…
Silicone is anything but shallow
by evelyn shaller-auslander (reprinted with the permission of the author)
Nina Arsenault wrote and stars in The Silicone Diaries, playing at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre from November 14th-21st. Based on a series of articles for wrote for fab magazine detailing the trials and tribulations of aquiring the many dangerous silicone injections needed to produce her very feminine body, Silicone details more cosmetic procedures than you thought possible. Directed by Brendan Healy, this is one queer show you won’t want to miss.
I may or may not have snuck into her dressing room to take her make-up and wardrobe hostage until she answered my questions…
Many people are surprised to hear that you have a Master’s degree and taught at York University. Do you ever feel limited by people’s expectations?
I feel like I challenge people’s expectations. I sometimes think people underestimate my intelligence –maybe because I’m trans, maybe because I have big hair and wear lots of lip gloss. I don’t think it ever limits me in the end though. It means I get to see the ah-ha moment when people realize that I’m fiercer than they thought. It’s fun.
Do you consider yourself to be a feminist?
I am a feminist who believes that every woman has the right to be the type of woman she wants to be, and that all women have the right to seek happiness and pleasure wherever they choose.
Why do hordes of gay men idolize you?
I just assume that anyone who is a fan of my work is someone who has felt at some point in their life that they have had to fight to be who they are. At the end of the day we are all meant to be as beautiful, as sexy, as creative, as bold, as flamboyant, as challenging as we want to be. I feel bad when I see truly fabulous outrageous people being pressured by society to be smaller than they are. I think a lot of fags, particularly femme fags, relate with that. And then there’s also fags who relate with me because they are also obsessed with their bodies. Continue reading
For a high resolution version of this image go to:
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_Emt7dt2kFJ8/SwbpzwuVK7I/AAAAAAAAAPQ/eZ_R83YY72E/s1600/Metro_Enza.jpg
(by Aurora Stewart de Pena)
Nina Arsenault, I think, is 6 foot 2. She has tumbling red hair that tangles above her shoulders, a perfect waspy ski-jump nose and too-green green eyes. The roundest hips, the longest legs, the smallest waist, the thinnest wrists, the fullest breasts. She has had over 60 cosmetic surgeries.
She looks like Jessica Rabbit and I am a little bit afraid of her.
She discusses, in The Silicone Diaries, how she came to be this way; the passion that drove her to create this perfect, surreal, intimidating woman.
This is not necessarily a piece about making the transition from man to woman. Arsenault did make that transition, but this is nothing so elementary. She instead reveals through her impeccably performed monologues that as long as she has known what she thought was beautiful she has sped toward achieving it with athletic focus. It is her obsession. Of course I’m obsessed with beauty, too. I’m a woman and I live in North America, and in the darkest parts of my heart where I keep the fear that I may be a bad person and all of the vicious things I’ve ever thought is the belief that my value is equal to my looks, be they good or bad. My brain and my politics would argue, but I have so many nightmares about disfigurement that it’s ridiculous to pretend these things don’t matter to me.
A sexist society created the idea that though beauty was a requirement for a woman’s success, it was a shallow and frivolous thing to pursue. This is a particularly Western shame, and throughout the course of the show Arsenault compares herself to a Geisha, a type of woman she believes is respected for her dedication to beauty at all costs. Here, the men in charge feel a deep guilt for being aroused by beauty in all of its arresting power and not by puritan-valued wifely qualities like compassion, sweetness or warmth.
If this idea is changing, and I believe it is, Arsenault is at the front line. It was wonderful to discover, throughout the course of this remarkable show, that the woman so initially intimidating to me is open, honest, funny and brilliant. Continue reading
Getting a long look at Nina Arsenault is a piece of theatre in and of itself. Canada’s most celebrated transsexual has a curvaceous body that’s part Jessica Rabbit, part Grace Jones, all dangerous swerves and angles that meet at points accessible only by plastic surgery or divine intervention. Director Brendan Healy (who is also Buddies’ new Artistic Director) makes a wise choice, then, to stage Arsenault’s one-transsexual show in the intimate backroom of Buddies’ Cabaret. Arsenault’s life’s work is what you see, a living altar to the female form that is unimaginably theatrical.
Though the play’s video projections and dramatic lighting take away from her sardonic storytelling, simplistic staging is all Arsenault needs, as one mere chair becomes an exercise bike, surgery table and resting point for Tommy Lee’s lap. A traumatic and hilarious narrative propels the stories further, chronicling Arsenault’s first look at nudie magazines in a Beamsville trailer park to a voluntary castration surgery in Mexico. Determined to transform herself into what she calls a “living self portrait,” Arsenault endures 60 surgeries, including dangerous black-market silicone injections, where the risk is that the silicone may enter her bloodstream to the point of drowning her.
It’s Arsenault’s brave candor that makes The Silicone Diaries absolutely unforgettable. Continue reading
The Silicone Diaries: The performer as work of art
by Richard Ouzounian
When faced with the unique, all one can do is acknowledge how truly special it is.
That, to my mind, is the only possible response to The Silicone Diaries, which opened Tuesday night at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre.
There have been many, many performers before now who have gone on to the stage and turned their lives into a one-person show. Some of them may have been more dramatic than what Nina Arsenault is currently doing, some of them might be slicker, or funnier, or more heart-breaking.
But none, I am willing to bet, has been such a complete experience, where the performer herself is the ultimate work of art. Continue reading
the artist Orlan
—from Eugenie Lemoine Luccioni’s “The Dress” as read before each of French artist Orlan’s seminal plastic surgery art performances
When Andy Warhol declared “I love plastic. I want to be plastic.” almost fifty years ago, he was honoring the true idol of his era. Warhol wasn’t being cheeky or ironic – he was getting spiritual. A substance of powerful polymorphic properties, at the time plastic was the perfect embodiment of malleability and transformability . A sleek and shiny entity that seemed indestructible, it was a paragon of immortality. Warhol rightfully recognized that plastic was a quintessential representation of mid-twentieth century ideals.
We now live in the age of silicone. These semi-inorganic polymeric compounds are even more mutable and closer to being eternal than plastic. Silicone has affected our daily lives in countless ways (hello lube) but perhaps its most profound impact has only begun to be felt. With this substance, we have been given the unparalelled ability to manifest our innermost desires on our external flesh. We can refashion the bodies that nature imposed on us to more closely fit our own terms. We can incarnate our own visions of perfection; become the literal personifications of our most profound fantasies; transform ourselves into avatars of our deepest interiors.
Much of the discourse around plastic surgery is based on a series of assumptions. On the one hand, defenders tell us that there is a schism in the way that we experience our identities – how we look on the outside is at odds with who we believe we authentically are inside – and these surgical interventions are justified because they satisfy some apparent ly profound need for coherence in our identities. On the other hand, detractors argue that we live in a world where one’s self-image is distorted through endless media refractions and these surgeries are turning us into reproductions of mediated versions of reality that have nothing to do with the real.
Coherence. Real. Words that come out of a model of identity that is constant and stable.
Like Warhol, Nina Arsenault (herself, in some ways, a Warholian creation) understands silicone. She has used this substance to raise the pursuit of the real fake to metaphysical levels. In doing so, she destabilizes the coherence and authenticity of identity. Like silicone itself, Nina creates a new paradigm of mutable identity: one that will not stick, that is likely to change, inconstant, variable. And magnificent. Tonight, she is a silicone goddess and you are in her white temple. In her presence, you can no longer tell where the artificial ends and the real begins; what is sacred and what is profane; what is constant and what is changing. And you embark on a journey where the imaginary merges with the physical to create the idealized landscape that is art.
Enjoy the show!
Brendan Healy
Artistic Director, Buddies in Bad Times Theatre
(published with the permission of the author)
image from video projections in The Silicone Diaries
Buddies in Bad Times Theatre has added an extra performance of The Silicone Diaries due to demand. The extra show will be on Sunday, November 22 at 8pm.
Due to other shows scheduled to move into the theatre we can not extend the run any longer than this.
We are recommending that people get their tickets in advance to ensure seating.
For tickets call 416.975.8555 12pm-8pm or go to artsexy.ca
Thanks to everyone who has helped get word out about the show!!!! xoxox