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

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!!!

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?

A: I’m not really sure, because as a child I was always fascinated by Geisha girls. I went to theatre school and I was really interested in types of performance that were so intensely disciplined that they were spiritual pursuits. Things like gaucho dancing or kabuki, intensive hardcore training. A lot of those traditions use codified behaviour or masks or abstractions of the body. I was also fascinated as a child by Egyptian hieroglyphics and art. It was the abstraction of the female body into art. We think now of the abstraction of the female body as a patriarchal oppressive thing, and it is in our culture, but if you look back on early fertility goddesses, their bodies are not real human bodies. They have enormous breasts or massive hips. I’ve always been drawn to that. I think when I started transitioning I thought I just wanted to be a woman. And the greater I got into the surgical procedures, the more I wanted to push them. I see that coming together with my performances now. There’s a way to perform femininity that, like the Geisha girl, can be a type of spiritual pursuit. That’s where I think I’m headed. I’m really interested in an esthetic lifestyle now, where the discipline of the work consumes my time.

Q: The sense of what’s radical has changed since you began your physical transformation.

A: I remember when I was first telling people I wanted to have plastic surgery in 1999, and the response was always, ‘Oh no! Don’t change yourself. You have to be real. We have to protect our authentic selves.’ That was before programs like Extreme Makeover and all those shows were even on TV. So, even just the concept of physically changing your body was blasphemous. People today just don’t think that way. A new generation of kids are growing up with plastic surgery. They’re used to seeing surgically-altered female faces on TV everyday. The esthetic of beauty is changing.

Q: Yet, in some markets for actors, fake boobs are no longer an asset.

A: Yes, in porn, they want girls to have real breasts now. Well, you know, that’s very interesting to me, to just note that female bodies change with the times, with fashion, that what you are can be in vogue or not in vogue.

Q: Do you see any parallels between yourself and people who modify their bodies with heavy tattoos and piercings?

A: I guess everyone who modifies their bodies is doing it for different reasons. Something that I’ve heard a lot of people say when they get tattoos or piercings is that it helps them reclaim their body. The act of marking their body or piercing it gives them a kind of ritual ownership over it. It’s been very difficult for me, obviously, to claim my body because I was born into a male body.

Q: Do you think you’re going to keep your penis?

A: I don’t know. It’s not something I think about getting rid of. I have transsexual girlfriends and some of them think of that part of themselves like it’s a tumor. I believe I am a woman inside, there’s no doubt about that. But I don’t have that relationship with that part of me that it grosses me out. It’s more important to be socially accepted as a woman and look like a woman. At this point, my body is so different anyways. I just think I’m a woman with a very unique body.

Q: You mentioned Madonna as an inspiration. What do you think of Lady Gaga?

A: Lady Gaga (who is not a transsexual) makes me proud to be a transsexual. I say this because she’s different. I think of her in a time period of really intense normativity where most people in culture are becoming more and more like each other. If you don’t fit in, everybody’s looking for what’s wrong with you. There’s a greater homogenization, so I love that in popular culture there is someone who stands for being different, stands for being outrageous, is exploring her inner freak, is sexual. I think she’s exactly what culture needed when she came along. Culture was just, like, “Thank you, where have you been?”

Q: What’s next for you?

A: It’s performance. I’ll continue to use autobiographical material, but I’m interested in exploring experiences that I’d only be able to describe as mystical. The theatre artists that really, really excite me have done work that you can’t really even call plays. They’re experiences that seem mystical. They’re rituals. Dance is also very exciting. I can see myself going into that in the future. I think because of the ways in which I’ve altered my body dance is very exciting to me. I don’t see bodies like mine in dance.

Q: You’ve danced in clubs before.

A: In strip clubs, yes. But I don’t do that any more. As transsexuals we used to strip in the basement of this trashy strip club where they had regular females on the first floor. There were moments of poignancy. I saw great artistry in what some of the girls were doing. I haven’t done any sex work in about two years. Now I’m monogamous. I’ve been with my boyfriend for over three years.

Q: Any plans to wed?

A: We’ve spoken about getting married, but I’m not sure what’s going to happen.

Questions and answers have been edited for space.

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.

(photography by Tanja-Tiziana)

(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.

I recently had the pleasure of attending Telling Takes Out of School, a project of the Playwriting and New Play Dramaturgy students at York U’s Theatre Department. The evening consisted of original monologues presented or performed by the students. Each monologue was inspired by one of Toronto’s leading theatre professionals. Each student had chosen a different artist to interview earlier this year and created a work based upon that person’s essence. I saw pieces inspired by Daniel Brooks, John Mighton, Sky Gilbert, Evalyn Parry, David Smuckler, Kelly Thornton, and others.

Because I know some of the artists and their work it was fasinating to see how the 3rd and 4th year students experienced them.

One of the students, Dan Vernon, interviewed me back in October and devised a beautiful piece called “The Nun and the Wolf.” I was impressed and honoured by how he interpreted me.  His monologue was very provocative (how fitting!), and there was a palpable shifting in the audience at the climax of his piece.

There were bios of some of the inspiring artists in the program.  Dan included only a single quote from me in the program: “I want to be able to be a human animal.” 

The night was conceived and directed by Judith Rudakoff. Dramaturgy by Judith Rudakoff, Samantha Serles, Hilary Sherman, Derek Gingrich, Brendee Green.

It was a free event, but voluntary donations were collected for Covenant House Toronto and over one hundred dollars was raised.

The poster image was photographed by Judith Rudakoff. The poster design was by Chris Michael Burns.