TRANS(per)FORMING Nina Arsenault: An Unreasonable Body of Work is a book which is being published about me and my work by Intellect Books. The book is edited by Judith Rudakoff. There is information on the book below. It will be available for purchase in May.
CUT AND PASTE THE FOLLOWING LINK TO GO TO INTELLECT BOOKS’ TRANS(per)FORMING Nina Arsenault: An Unreasonable Body of Work:
http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/books/view-Book,id=4875/
Not yet Available
Price £19.95, $30
ISBN 9781841505718
Paperback 160 pages
230x174mm
Transgendered playwright-performer, columnist, and sex worker Nina Arsenault has undergone more than sixty plastic surgeries in pursuit of a feminine beauty ideal. In TRANS(per)FORMING Nina Arsenault, Judith Rudakoff brings together a diverse group of contributors, including artists, scholars, and Arsenault herself to offer an exploration of beauty, image, and the notion of queerness through the lens of Arsenault’s highly personal brand of performance art.
Illustrated throughout with photographs of the artist’s transformation over the years and demonstrating her diversity of personae, this volume contributes to a deepening of our understanding of what it means to be a woman and what it means to be beautiful. Also included in this volume is the full script of Arsenault’s critically acclaimed stage play, The Silicone Diaries.
Nina Arsenault: The Daughter of the Air will take place at Ryerson Theatre (43 Gerrard Str East) on Friday, Nov 4th, 11:30am-1:00pm. It is a department wide event, but only open to Ryerson students.
Cynthia Asperger, the head of the Ryerson Theatre Dept, acting teacher and performer Cynthia Ashperger, will be presenting an excerpt from a paper she wrote about me. As part of the development of her paper I got to do a workshop with Cynthia in the Michael Checkov ‘Imaginary Body’ approach to acting.
Dramaturg, scholar and playwright Judith Rudakoff will also be speaking about my work. I’ve worked with Judith on the development of both my one woman shows The Silicone Diaries and I was Barbie.
Both of their works are being published in TRANS(per)FORMING Nina Arsenault, a full length multi-disciplinary analysis of my work from national and international scholars and artists. Prof. Rudakoff is also the editor of the book which is scheduled to be released May, 2012.
I will also be at the event talking about how I have developed various artistic works, and all three of us will take part in the following Q and A.
Thrilled to be working with these two truly fierce theatre practitioners.
(photo of Judith Rudakoff by Christopher Gentile)
This interview was originally published in V-Rag, Vancouver’s Gay Arts Magazine and in their online format at the following address:
http://blog.v-rag.com/2011/05/may-the-spring-edition/
Nina Arsenault
by Michael Venus
Nina Arsenault is a trans-discipline artist whose work has blurred the lines between artist and art, character and actor and reality and performance. She has worked in live performance, video, photography and popular national media. Nina has seduced a nation with her wit and charm, not to mention her “Barbie” body, which she continues to shape into the body she wants. This educated living doll fills us in on her passions and drive to be herself and why she is becoming such an icon.
You studied theatre at York and continue to do a lot of stage work including The Silicone Diaries and I was Barbie. Tell us about those projects.
The Silicone Diaries my one woman about my quest for inner and outer beauty through sixty cosmetic surgeris and procedures. It’s a pretty accessible theatre piece although it is very intense emotionally. The Toronto production had people fainting as well as vomitting in the audience. But other parts of the show are very funny. People find the story about how rocker Tommy Lee tried to pick me up hilarious, and I sometimes crack myself up when I’m telling it. I was Barbie is my second play. It is about the night I was asked by Mattel to represent Barbie at her offical 50th birthday party in Toronto. I’ve told it in different ways because some parts of it are really like a fairy tale. Other parts of it are very Hunter S. Thompson.
I first saw you when you appeared on The Lofters and from there you have done a fair amount of television work. Will we be seeing more of you on the tube? Fave show you were on? Fondest memory?
Actually, I have turned down three television series in the last twelve months as well as two feature film roles. I am concentrating on my artistic work –my own autobiographical plays, my video work and photographic self-portraiture. I am still interested in doing tv and film but only if the roles are very well written. Otherwise, I write and create my own work to act in. On film, TV and even in literature there are few characterizations of trans people that I really admire. I won’t do something I don’t believe in just to be on national TV. I am interested in making art.
Over the past decade we have seen a real shift with seeing more and more transexuals on television and in the media. What are your thoughts on that and what do you think the next decade will bring?
I think it’s great that there are transsexuals in the media. I’d like for people to realize that there are a lot of different types of ways to be transgendered and this seems like a very good medium to disseminate that. Also, I don’t really have a problem with transgendered people being represented in such banal ways in the media as I think that almost everyone is represented in a pretty rigid way in mainstream media. From my point of view the BBC has always led the way for putting interesting queer people on TV. My aesthetic sensibilities are much more edgy than anything I see on Canadian television lately.
You were a part of Idea City 10. How was that experience and how did it come to be?
Basically, I got an email from Moses Znaimer personally asking me to come and speak at his annual conference of extraordinary thinkers and
doers. It was a fabulous experience. Znaimer’s team had everything so well coordinated from beginning to end — the technical aspects of things, camera angles, assistants, smooze parties so the speakers could meet the participants at the end of the day to discuss the ideas. All executed with elegance and panache. He’s incredibly grounded and brilliant at everything he attempts. I met so many accomplished people from so many different fields of work: architects, sexologists, magazine editors, film producers, intellectuals, academics, pornographers and media artists. I felt like I was in a room with so many people who are interested in pushing culture further. People who are interested in the avante-gard, interested in what comes next, interested in being trail-blazers.
Do you practice magic?
My dramaturg and writing mentor Judith Rudakoff once told me that magic is simply energy and will directed at change. That is the best definition for magic that I have ever heard of.
What do you have planned for the next year?
I am working on a video piece with a hot young director and artist named Jordan Tannahil. He is going to be an international talent. He is major! Silicone Diaries is touring to Ottawa to be a part of the Magnetic North Theatre Festival and will play in Vancouver in 2012. I’m doing a lot of photographic self-portraits with the help of some amazing photographers like Bruce Labruce and Neil Mota. It’s a dream to work with people who I consider to be amoung the top artists in Canada as well as the top provocateurs because I think that art, especially queer art, should be provocative. I’m also working on another video project called Ophelia/Machine about sadomasochism and sexual objectification. That piece will probably be in development for a long time, at least another eighteen months.
What is your advice for young trans people who want to break into the biz?
The sex biz or show business? Either way: make your own work.
Silicone Diaries Has a Second Run, and For Good Reason
by Zachary Flavelle
from http://theatreinreview.wordpress.com/2010/12/13/silicone-diaries-has-a-second-run-and-for-good-reason/
Nina Arsenault is arguably Toronto’s most celebrated trans-gendered artist, writer, performer, and personality. She is an educator, a performer, and an inspiration. She has had over 60 plastic surgery operations to sculpt her body from the male vessel she was trapped inside into the female body which she now displays proudly as another work of art; her ideal in a quest to find beauty. But The Silicone Diaries is much more than just a chronicling of Nina’s amazing transformations, it is a journey that delves into Nina’s deep thought process as she embraced a wonderful creation that could help make her aspirations of beauty come true; silicone.
Coming back to Buddies for the second time, The Silicone Diaries is an autobiographical piece created by Nina with the help of dramaturg Judith Rudakoff. The expertly delivered monologues (not spoken at the audience, but to the audience, as if Nina was carrying on a personal conversation with each individual present) touch on keystone moments in Nina’s life. Each monologue is preceded by a video projection, often depicting images of Nina’s various changes, sometimes with real footage of her operations and recovery. While occasionally graphic, the images help to tell parts of the story that Nina’s words cannot.
Nina skilfully merges humour into her recollections, helping to break up more sorrowful or sombre moments, and bring a laugh into the theatre. A perfect example is shared in the time she met famous Rock Star, Tommy Lee, while at a club one night. Or her adventures with two other trans-gendered girls seeking silicone injections. She recalls the lengths to which she went to attain beauty, including work in the sex trade, illegal silicone injections, and her various plastic surgeries. And yet, as simple as it sounds when reading it, non of these situations are simple, with deep human connections playing an important role in each.
She moves around on the small stage, with only a salon chair and a table, (design by Richard Feren) as she shares memories of her first experience with beauty; her male, 5-year-old self seeing a mannequin. And it’s fitting, for as she travels the space with the grace of a refined dancer, (posing gently, a slender wrist on her hip, another gesturing outward to the side) it all comes full circle as the gestures reflect those of a mannequin. When Nina finally removes her wig to reveal her true body, standing 6’2,” shaved head, slender features, and a womanly body, it becomes obvious that the image that was once beheld by a 5-year-old boy had been finally realized in her personal work of art.
Each vignette of Nina’s metamorphosis expresses her determination to attain her ideal beauty at any cost. And as she learns along the way, it can come with the price of addiction. Nina’s story is one of a dark and ugly truth at the lengths women can go to in the search for something, but it is also a story of realization. Nina learns to accept her final form, her eyes opened to the risks she had been taking, and sees that the next stage in maintaining her beauty comes not from surgery, but from what she can do on her own.
Ultimately, The Silicone Diaries is part autobiography, but it is also a means of hope and inspiration to everyone that sees it. Not just for those in the queer community, for Nina’s story can translate into a positive message for anyone. It is a true story of courage, perseverance, and, unavoidably, silicone. The Silicone Diaries runs until December 11th.
For tickets call 416-975-8555 or go to www.buddiesinbadtimes.com. Advanced tickets are recommended to ensure seating.
Show info below:
Buddies in Bad Times Theatre presents
The Silicone Diaries
Created and Performed by Nina Arsenault
Directed by Brendan Healy
Dramaturgy by Judith Rudakoff
Production Design Trevor Schwellnus
Sound Design Richard Feren
November 25 – December 11, 2010
The Silicone Diaries is Nina Arsenault’s tour de force account of her transition from an awkward man into a jaw dropping silicone bombshell, a process that spanned eight years, sixty surgical procedures and a lifetime of preparation. After a sold-out run last season, Buddies is thrilled to welcome back this inspirational, hilarious and harrowing encounter with one of the most provocative queer voices in the country as she wrestles with the contradictions that surround the pursuit of inner and outer beauty.
“**** (out of four) profoundly moving” – Toronto Star
“***** (out of five) absolutely unforgettable” – Eye Weekly
“positively hypnotic” – Globe and Mail
“captivating theatre” – Xtra!
Opens November 25
Runs to December 11
Shows Tues – Sun 8pm
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
The book is being published by Intellect Books. It will be an international publication. Intellect has already published books about trailblazers like David Cronenberg, David Lynch and some other amazing artists. To see their other titles check out their website http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/
I already know some awesome writers and cultural contributors who are planning on participating in this project. Please, feel free to repost this call for submissions anywhere as we are trying to reach as many people as possible with as many different perspectives.
The book will be called TRANS(per)FORMING Nina Arsenault: Body of Work, Body of Art
Below is the official call for contributors.
–Thank you
Nina
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS:
Transgendered Canadian performance artist Nina Arsenault has been characterized as cyborg, intellectual, and artist. After sixty plastic surgeries to feminize and beautify her originally male body, Arsenault has become an icon for a new queer generation. Her stage plays, electronic presence through videos disseminated online, website, blog, social networking presentation sites, her print media writing, and her celebrity/nightclub appearances as well as writings about her life and work alternately objectify and subjectify her: she is both artist and work of art. 
Rejecting the binary of real versus fake and dedicated to exploring authenticity, Arsenault’s work continues to examine the relationship of the omnipresent female self within the newly constructed female body, while critics, theorists and documentarians continue to engage in an examination of the artist as art.
TRANS(per)FORMING Nina Arsenault: Body of Work, Body of Art, to be published by Intellect Books Ltd, UK in 2012 will be edited by Judith Rudakoff. Included will be academic essays, critical response papers, popular media articles, Arsenault’s writing and colour photographs. 
Submissions from the perspective of theatre, video, feminist theory, queer theory, gender studies, sexual diversity studies, performance studies, cultural studies, media studies, celebrity studies or any related areas are invited in the form of academic essays, critical response papers or popular media articles on topics which may include (but are not limited to):
· Longing and Belonging: Authenticity versus Realness
· Queer aesthetics: the art object as beautiful, erotic, satirical, subversive, comic, tragic, blashp
hemous and grotesque.
· Superstar reproduction: Nina Arsenault and the manufacturing of celebrity
· Double vision: The masculine gaze in the art of Nina Arsenault’s femininity.
· Transgressing acceptable trans-narratives: return to normative society or failed tragic queen
· The artist as art
· The intersections of vocal training and dramaturgy in the solo theatrical artist
· Arsenault’s self-portraiture in the digital age of self-representation and self-dissemination
· The democratization of social networking and the sexually discriminated artist: Arsenault’s Facebook site as installation.
· Palatable empathies: Narratives of Nina Arsenault’s transformation on television and in the theatre
· Titillation, ornamentation and the ritualized body: The art of geisha vs. the transsexual gay nightlife hostess
· Mythology vs pathology: a crossroads for the queer artist?
· Chasing the Real from inside the labyrinth of postmodern deconstructivism(s)
· Blasphemous iconography: creating art that complicates the world instead of trying to save it.
· Heretic transmissions: Nina Arsenault and the politics of the right and the left
Please direct all proposals and queries to Judith Rudakoff, Editor at infoninabook@gmail.com on or before September 30 2010. Essays, papers and articles selected for publication (subject to final peer review) must be received on or before February 1 2011.
For academic essays selected for publication, reading copies of Silicone Diaries or I Was Barbie will be made available for consultation.
Proposals of up to 500 words (academic essays) and up to 250 words (critical response papers or popular media articles) should be accompanied by a brief biographical statement (in Microsoft Word .doc or .rtf format) and covering email note should include your name, any affiliation, preferred email contact information. Academic essays should be between 3000-5000 words and critical response papers and popular media articles should be between 500-1500 words.
Prospective contributors may consider source material such as but not exclusive to:
· The Silicone Diaries, stage play
· I Was Barbie, stage play
· “Glamour Crack”, series of videos produced by Nina Arsenault http://www.youtube.com/user/venusmachina
· Video representation of Nina Arsenault on YouTube http://www.youtube.com/user/ninaarsenault· Nina Arsenault’s website and blog: www.ninaarsenault.com
· T Girl columns for Fab Magazine (archived electronically at http://www.fabmagazine.com/archive.html)
· Publicity Archive (up to December 2009), housed in Clara Thomas Special Collections and Archives, Scott Library, York University, Toronto, Ontario. (File TPC 220)
· Club/party hosting, celebrity appearances as Nina Arsenault
· Appearances as fictional characters (Barbie at L’Oreal Fashion Week 2009 in Toronto, Jessica Rabbit)
· Television appearances in Canada (including The Jon Dore Show (Comedy Network), Kink (Showcase), Train 48 (Global), Fashion Television and Sex Matters (CITY)
SHOW TIMES AND DATES BELOW…
GO TO WWW.SUMMERWORKS.CA FOR TIX!!!
Thie following is from the Toronto Star. To view the article on their site CUT AND PASTE THE FOLLOWING LINK:
http://www.thestar.com/living/article/822008–sexy-transsexual-nina-arsenault-on-life-art-and-her-penis
by Jim Rankin, Staff Reporter (photos also by Jim Rankin)
This won’t be a narrative about a girl trapped inside the body of an awkward boy from Beamsville, who went through 60 plastic surgeries and cosmetic procedures to transform her body into Jessica Rabbit with a penis she remains rather attached to.
Nina Arsenault — whose critically-acclaimed autobiographical play, The Silicone Diaries, will brighten stages this fall and next year in Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa — decided a while back that she was tired of others telling the story of her journey to “reclaim” her body.
Yes, beginning in 1999, she embarked on a long, painful, and at times scary metamorphosis that included risky surgeries and illegal silicone injections.
But, sitting behind a desk at the Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, dressed in a clingy, low-cut black top, leather miniskirt and fishnet stockings, the 36-year-old former sex worker, writer, lecturer and performer with two postgraduate degrees in theatre and playwriting prefers not to dwell on that.
Arsenault is in demand these days. Pride celebrations are around the corner. She’ll be hosting parties, including a prom for young lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual and questioning queers.
She will also take to the stage at the upcoming IdeaCity conference of big minds in Toronto, and tell her story.
Later this summer, at Theatre Passe Muraille, she’s scheduled to perform i was Barbie, another autobiographical play that riffs on a real-life gig she had to “represent a doll accused of f—–g up the body images of millions of little girls.”
As she put it in an email, it’s a “spiritual portrait of a glittery, digitally-commodified, plastic world from the point of view of a silicone transsexual who represents Barbie at her official birthday party and the opening night of Fashion Week . . . shades of Andy Warhol.”
Yes, she can write.
Her days consist of workouts, voice training with singer Fides Krucker and writing with mentor and collaborator Judith Rudakoff. She works out of her downtown apartment, where she oversees her publicity, right down to the cropping and airbrushing of photos that appear on her website. She likes, she says, to have the final say on everything, a prerogative she has borrowed from Madonna.
So, rather than a narrative, a Q&A followed by a photo shoot orchestrated by Arsenault seems appropriate for a woman who describes herself as a queer artist, and her body as a queer art object.
Q: You’re not the kind of model that sits back and lets the photographer call the shots?
A: No. I see myself more as an auteur. I like to be the subject of the work, but also the creator of the work. As transsexuals, there’s just been so many documentaries about us and they’re usually put together by non-transgendered people. The emphasis is always to make us palatable to whatever audience that’s being spoken to.
Q: How have people tried to make you more palatable?
A: No. 1, they try to make you less sexual. Less sexy.
Q: How is that possible?
A: I’ll take that as a compliment. Sometimes, I’ve done things for a newspaper where they’ll say, ‘We can’t print that photo. It’s too sexual.’ It’s just something about the way my lips are, or there’s maybe cleavage in it. And my response is always that people can get this online now — provocative, naked photos. I think that print media is really behind that way. Another way of making someone who is queer palatable to a normative mass audience is to pathologize them. It’s to say that the things that are different about them, the things that are unique about them, it must be because that person’s f—-d up. Certainly, I’ve been accused of that — it’s dysmorphia, intense perfectionism or narcissism. I always refuse to accept those perspectives on my life. I think it’s very important not to listen to your detractors.
Q: At what point did it become art for you, the transforming of your body? Continue reading
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.