Very excited about the return of The Silicone Diaries back to Buddies in Bad Times Theatre!!! We’re going to be reworking it a bit, and this time I will be performing in The Chamber. Following this production the show will be moving onto a Montreal production at Theatre La Chapelle.
(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.
a video trailer for my one woman play The Silicone Diaries…
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.” Continue reading
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
I am not a normal “woman trapped inside a man’s body.
This cultural soundbyte does not begin to emcompass the complexity of my experience.
These are the words of Nina Arsenault, transsexual icon and performance artist. In her creative work, perhaps better said, her body of work, Nina does not reduce her transformation from man to woman to a series of cleverly constructed vignettes. Nina is her body of work, inside and out, an audacious example of the artist as art.
“One of the things that has been written about me in the press,” she explains, “is that I have had sixty cosmetic surgeries or procedures at the cost of almost two hundred thousand dollars.” Know that only some of these procedures were transsexual surgeries, undertaken with the goal of sculpting an external gender more in line with the internal image she has always held of herself. The rest of the procedures, Nina has clarified, have more to do with the universal yearning for beauty.
The Silicone Diaries moves past confessions and transgressions to delve into a deeply personal psychological and emotional journey through Nina’s Hall of Mirrors, a state of being that is part labyrinth, part grotesque fun house. This play is not, as she characterizes some autobiographical stage plays, an enacted series of greatest memories of her transition. Firstly, Nina’s internal transformation is an ongoing, challenging work in process. Secondly, the external transition is worthy of far more than a documentary chronicling of events, no matter how funny, poignant, frightening and engaging those events may be. In part, The Silicone Diaries presents Nina’s frank and revealing story of one woman’s relationship to a manufactured substance, silicone, and the exquisite meanings it has written on, through and throughout her body. The play is also an active, empowering ritual.
Beyond acceptable, beyond reasonable, Nina validates and celebrates choices that are mythic in proportion, and human in depth of feeling. These are stories of longing and belonging, of need and passion, and ultimately, these are stories of magic where energy and will, directed at change, can achieve anything.
Judith Rudakoff
Dramaturg
(printed with the permission of the author)
York theatre alumna Nina Arsenault (BFA Spec. Hons. ’96, MFA ’00) is arguably Canada’s most celebrated transsexual. The founding artistic director of VenusMACHINE, actor on stage (Ladylike and I Was Barbie) and television (“Train 48”, “Locker Room”, “The Vent”), former contributor to the National Post, columnist for fab Magazine, and frequent guest lecturer, Arsenault has built a career around building herself a “perfect” body.
Arsenault brings The Silicone Diaries, a solo show about her transition from male to female, to the stage of Toronto’s Buddies in Bad Times Theatre Nov. 14 to 21. The production, directed by Brendan Healy, is dramaturged by Arsenault’s mentor from her student days at York, theatre Professor Judith Rudakoff.
Arsenault’s play traces her personal journey through 60 cosmetic surgeries (including her castration in Mexico), unexpected spiritual relationships with plastic surgeons and their staff, and a “Crying Game-style” encounter with rocker Tommy Lee.
She performed an early version of The Silicone Diaries to sold-out crowds and standing ovations at the Theatre on the Edge Festival in Saint John, NB, in 2008. After its Toronto run, Arsenault will be taking her production to the Nakai Theatre in Whitehorse, YT.
On a rehearsal break, Arsenault discussed some of the ideas fuelling her show, starting with the title.
“While the context is silicone and talking about my surgeries, it really has more to do with the diary aspect,” she said. “A diary is where you write down your most personal feelings, scary thoughts, and emotional and psychological stuff around what is happening in your life. That is really what this show is for me.”
Thematically, the production “explores the concepts of real and fake, and inner and outer beauty,” Arsenault said. “This concept of ‘real’ is everywhere. People talk about ‘being real’ or demand why other people can’t just ‘be real’. It’s hugely important to our culture, but it goes largely unexamined. We all think we mean the same thing.
“Identity is so complicated – what we like, what we strive to achieve. Some of these things are constructed by media images, family values, trauma in our lives,” she said. “No one can escape those sorts of influences. Still, we have this idea that we maintain an innate sense of ‘realness’ since birth. But how can we?”
Judith Rudakoff
Arsenault said watching Jennifer Lopez’s “I’m Real” music video illustrated the idea for her. “Here’s J. Lo, who has had a team of stylists – hair, makeup, fashion and lighting – singing ‘I’m Real’. She has personal trainers, dieticians, estheticians and image consultants. How is that real?
“When you examine ‘real’ in this context and you see how the definition of real seems to change every decade, the concept falls apart. It’s a hall of mirrors.” Continue reading
Transsexual Nina Arsenault may be perceived as “fake”, but the sixty cosmetic surgeries that transformed her from an awkward man into a 36D-26-40 bombshell are anything but. The Silicone Diaries is a full, frank and fierce exploration of the contradictions associated with the quest for beauty, balanced by an intimate and spiritual account of Arsenault’s adventures in plastic surgery. Buddies’ new Artistic Director, Brendan Healy directs Arsenault as she draws battles lines, wrestles with the conventions of patriarchy, and comes to peace with her radical queer body.
The Silicone Diaries explores the perceived differences between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ beauty, and challenges definitions of ‘realness’ and ‘fakeness’. Along the way, Arsenault proves an engaging raconteur chronicling everything from Playboy Bunny fantasies to black market injections, a Mexican castration, and a “Crying Game-style” collision with rocker Tommy Lee. The Silicone Diaries defies the cultural sound-byte of a “woman trapped in a man’s body” with intelligence and wit.
dramaturg Judith Rudakoff
About a week ago I finished the rehearsal draft of The Silicone Diaries. I’ve been rehearsing with it all week, tweaking it, making smaller changes, and I think it is pretty much solidly in place.
I originally wrote and compiled the script in about three weeks for the original production in New Brunswick last August. I’ve spent a good part of the last nine months rewriting the script for the Buddies in Bad Times production this November.
A major shout out goes out to my dramaturg, Judith Rudakoff. She has been with me through the entire process of rewriting. She’s the person I’ve gone to when I need someone to look at the text with new eyes, and she reflects back to me what I can not see anymore. She supports me when I’m too afraid to express what I really want to say or when the truth seems to terrifying to reveal. I turned to her when I needed inspiration, when I was stuck and not sure how to write anymore. And, she helped me make sense of the whole structure of the piece. Continue reading