originally published Dec 16, 2010
(excerpt:)
Each story is introduced by a title intermingled with projected images, some of them horrific shots taken during surgery (a nose job is a gory sight to behold in close-up).
Arsenault speaks in a low, controlled, intimate voice, just above a whisper, with a soupcon of melodrama.
Every slinky move is calculated: fingernails raked over her transparent latex dress, arms raised, undulating in front of a portrait of Aphrodite, goddess of love and beauty. Every verbal inflection is carefully controlled.
Silicone Diaries is a slick piece of theatre, built on a compelling narrative, an arresting stage presence and deft direction, by Brendan Healy (artistic director of Buddies in Bad Times since 2009).
In addition, this tall, slim, curvaceous artist who was chosen to be Mattel’s representative for Barbie, at the doll’s 50th birthday party during the 2009 fashion week in Toronto (watch for her next solo show, I Was Barbie), proves to be an excellent spokesperson for the trans-gender community.
From the moment she emerges out of the dry-ice smoke like a rock star, she’s charming, articulate, witty – “If you die during plastic surgery what do you say to God?” -and frank.
We learn, among other intimate details, that she still has a penis although she has had an “orchy” or orchiectomy to remove her testicles. Her discussions of bootleg silicone injections and their ramifications are not for the squeamish.
Referring to herself as a “shemale”, she talks freely about working in the sex trade within a virtual reality setting (chatting with several clients at a time from behind a blurred image of herself), as an erotic dancer, and as a prostitute -all to finance her expensive procedures. Her flirt-and-tell account of meeting rocker Tommy Lee is priceless.
While Arsenault remains willing to go to any length to perfect her image (even exercise), she does confess that the upkeep (two hours per day on makeup and hair alone) can be exhausting – thereby striking a chord with every woman in the audience. Sisters under the mascara, we are.
Vanity is certainly at play here, but Silicone Diaries is actually less self-indulgent than many one-person shows. Arsenault, a former columnist at Fab Magazine, takes her audience for a fascinating ride.
“The Silicone Diaries, Toronto based Barbie-doll Nina Arsenault (Canada’s answer to Amanda Lepore only smarter) is a fierce, frank one woman show about the question of beauty in a Crying-game collision of realness and fakeness.”
Self-Construction: Artifice And Art
by Megan Stewart
originally published January 4, 2011
go to http://roverarts.com/2011/01/self-construction-artifice-and-art/
I questioned what was driving me to go see The Silicone Diaries at Théâtre La Chapelle recently. An extreme curiosity about the experience of a transsexual woman? A shameless desire to witness the freaky and possibly grotesque? A hankering for the tell-all confessions often found in one-person shows?
These motivations made me uncomfortable. Yet I knew Nina Arsenault’s latest theatrical endeavour, chronicling her silicone-laden transformation from a maladroit man to a stunning beauty queen, produced by Toronto’s Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, would challenge my presumptions and expectations. I was not disappointed.
ORLAN, a French performance artist, has made a name for herself by subjecting her body to countless plastic surgeries which double as performances, demonstrating the unattainability of male-constructed beauty ideals. These days, she sports a chin modelled after Botticelli’s Venus, lips like François Boucher’s Europa and the forehead and protruding eyebrows of the Mona Lisa (which actually resemble a pair of bulging horns).
Arsenault’s performative surgical work, in contrast, strives toward a different ideal of beauty, one that she (arguably) constructs entirely herself. Onstage at Théâtre La Chapelle, a projected title flickers onto the set’s white backdrop. It announces, I am my own self-portrait, as the silicone-worshipping Arsenault describes her process of “getting artistic with my body”. In a quest to fashion an exterior self that corresponded with her interior perception of herself, Arsenault became a sculptor of sorts – with her body as her raw material.
From the moment Arsenault glides up onto her ultra-modern, gleaming white set, she captivates the audience, visually and verbally. She is a compelling performer and a bombshell to boot: big lips, high cheekbones, sculpted silicone breasts and hips. A long, blonde wig swoops dramatically over one eye, which remains hidden from view until finally she tosses her hair on the floor and exposes her painted face and naked skull. Tall and lithe, she slinks around the stage with coquettish flicks and brazen gestures, encased in a translucent plastic mini-dress that crinkles and snaps at her touch.
The production’s design complements her aesthetic. Arsenault’s space is a white, plastic and ultra-modern stage, complete with a light-up, disco-style floor. The lighting works with Arsenault’s body and objet d’art, creating long shadows that rise up against the backdrop, taking her impressive figure to epic proportions. Sometimes there is only one shadow; sometimes there are three, reminding us of the instability of the self, its projected, inconsistent, and deceptive nature. The spotlights and colour washes are occasionally replaced with a bright, clinical glare that exposes Arsenault as vulnerable, her beauty as suspicious.
Arsenault guides us through her life’s various stages of realization, starting as small boy who discovers the flawless beauty of a Zellers mannequin and the gauzy imagery of soft-core porn. A thought registers with this boy as he gapes at these idealistic depictions of women: Someday, somehow, he will grow up and embody such an image. Later, as numerous plastic surgeries accumulate under her belt, Arsenault recognizes the points when she looked most like a real woman, most like a mannequin, and most like her ideal perception of her self.
Arsenault treats her body as an object, an image, and a machine, but eventually she reaches her most powerful realization: her mortality. With her inner self at one with her exterior body, Arsenault accepts aging and death: She recognizes her humanity, despite all the plastic.
Arsenault’s text and delivery moves effortlessly from sharp, wicked and deadpan to disarmingly heartfelt and poignant. Her stories are never talk-show confessional; they are controlled, upfront and unapologetic. Her pursuit of beauty and the reconciliation of the interior and exterior selves took her on a unique journey, but it nevertheless reflects a struggle faced by many, whether silicone-worshippers or not.
Too late to catch The Silicone Diaries at Théâtre La Chapelle but you can do so at this summer’s Magnetic North Theatre Festival in Ottawa. Théâtre La Chapelle’s exciting multidisciplinary season continues in January, check out their website for more info.
CUT AND PASTE the link below to hear the show:
http://www.radio-canada.ca/audio-video/pop.shtml#urlMedia=http://www.radio-canada.ca/Medianet/2010/CBF/ChristianeCharette201012160905_2.asx
Le reliquat de Nina by Nathalie Petrowski
originally published in La Presse on Dec 18, 2010
also available at http://www.cyberpresse.ca/chroniqueurs/nathalie-petrowski/201012/18/01-4353705-le-reliquat-de-nina.php?utm_categorieinterne=trafficdrivers&utm_contenuinterne=cyberpresse_B40_chroniqueurs_361575_accueil_POS2
Nina Arsenault est ce «transsexuel», pour ne pas dire ce turbo travesti, qui s’est imposé 61 chirurgies plastiques pour devenir un canon de beauté féminine. Et qui a brillamment réussi. Son spectacle, Silicone Diaries, porté aux nues à Toronto et présenté toute la semaine à La Chapelle à Montréal, se termine ce soir. Avec un peu de chance, il reste des billets mais j’en doute. La demande pour Nina, née Rodney Arsenault, dans un parc de roulottes pourri de l’Ontario profond, est grande. Cela se comprend: le personnage est fascinant et son spectacle en forme de confession tellement captivant qu’il ferait fondre le plus coriace des scepticismes. C’est ce qui m’est arrivé dès l’entrée en scène de Nina.
Sa réserve toute féminine, ses gestes lents et élégants de geisha, ses jambes fines, ses bras longs et minces se déployant comme des ailes, ses mains de princesse, ses courbes de Marilyn, ses seins de Pamela, tout cela m’a immédiatement subjuguée. Et, par la même occasion, profondément troublée, comme si je n’avais pas toutes les clés pour comprendre cet objet hybride et confondant qui a sacrifié son corps sur l’autel de la beauté pour devenir une femme plastifiée, magnifiée, irréelle, trop belle pour être vraie, trop vraie pour être réduite à un freak show.
Avec Nina, on n’est plus dans la revue de travelos cheap ou bon enfant. On est dans la tragédie de la beauté, dans sa fatalité et sa profondeur. On est aussi dans un pays étrange rempli de questionnement.Qu’est-ce qui pousse un homme né Rodney à voir son corps comme un corps étranger et une prison de laquelle il doit à tout prix s’échapper? D’où tire-t-il la certitude qu’il y a eu chez lui, méprise biologique, confusion des genres, mélange des enveloppes et que son vrai corps est celui de sa soeur?
Mais Nina ne répond à aucune de ces questions. Elle n’a plus besoin de le faire: grâce au miracle de la chirurgie plastique, elle a réussi à devenir la femme fantasmée qu’elle brûlait d’être depuis l’âge de 5 ans, éradiquant toute trace de virilité sur son visage, réduisant en poussière les derniers vestiges du mâle qu’elle a été, à une seule exception près: le reliquat de son pénis.
Nina Arsenault a subi 61 opérations sur son corps sauf celle qui aurait fait d’elle une «vraie» femme.
Dans une entrevue à la télé, elle a expliqué qu’elle travaillait dans un club où la clientèle masculine aimait consommer des «transsexuels» sexy, féminins, pourvus d’une généreuse poitrine mais pas amputés d’en bas. Ils veulent la totale, quoi.
Cette explication est la chose la plus décevante non pas du spectacle, mais de Nina elle-même. Car pendant toute la durée de ses Silicone Diaries, alors qu’elle s’approprie les plus grandes névroses féminines et incarne avec une touchante sensibilité le désespoir des femmes coincées dans un miroir déformant et courant en vain après une image idéalisée d’elles-mêmes qu’elles n’atteignent jamais, tout ce temps-là, ce n’est pas un travelo qu’on voit. C’est une femme, une soeur, une complice, qui souffre pour être belle, qui a investi temps, argent et énergie dans une oeuvre éphémère qu’elle sait condamnée à flétrir et à vieillir. Nina, a-t-on l’impression, c’est nous, les femmes. Mais non.
Le reliquat qu’elle garde au chaud entre ses jambes est en fin de compte la clé pour comprendre que tout cela n’est qu’une histoire de marché, une histoire de vente au détail, une histoire plate de prostitution. Continue reading
Nina’s luftballons
Richard Burnett
from http://www.hour.ca/columns/3dollarbill.aspx?iIDArticle=20900
It is pure synchronicity that I am blabbing with Nina Arsenault – the most celebrated transsexual in Canada – on international Transgender Day of Remembrance, a day set aside each Nov. 20 to memorialize those murdered because of anti-transgender hatred or prejudice.
Nina, star of her critically-hailed, autobiographical one-transwoman show, The Silicone Diaries, is very aware of this too.
“The hardest part of my transformation was when I was living as a woman but still looked very masculine and people would make fun of me on the street,” Nina says. “They’d yell things out of their car. I realized there is a double standard for transsexuals, because if you’re a beautiful transsexual, people will accept you more easily. If you ‘pass’ you will be more accepted. You may not even be noticed. But if you don’t pass… That’s what really hurt me – people don’t see you as human.”
Truth is, after 60 cosmetic surgeries over eight long years, Nina doesn’t look very human.
Similarly, last winter when I asked famed NYC tranny (and photographer Dave LaChappelle’s muse) Amanda Lepore what she thinks she looks like, Lepore replied, “There is something alien about my face – there is something spacey about me. If I dressed like Lady Gaga, [my face] would get lost. But because I dress retro, vamp and classic, the [alien] qualities come out more.”
Nina Arsenault is equally frank. “I look like a cyborg,” she says, unafraid to showcase her eye-popping 36D-26-40 bombshell body in her first play, the aptly-named I Was Barbie, which was a hit during Barbie’s 50th anniversary at Toronto Fashion Week in June 2009.
But it wasn’t always so.
The first scene in The Silicone Diaries is set in the Golden Horseshoe Trailer Park of Beamsville, Ontario, where Arsenault lived with her parents and brother until the age of six. In this scene, young Nina (then Rodney) and the local trailer park boys gather to look at a stack of Penthouse magazines. Today, 30 years later, it is Nina who looks like she could pose for Penthouse.
“My parents are generally supportive, though my mom thinks I’m too sexy,” Nina admits. “She thinks I didn’t need to get my breasts done so large and my lips so big. And she thinks I wear too much make-up. She’s worried about my life being difficult but now that they’ve come to see my plays, they get a kick out of how audacious I am.”
While Disney-style drag queens now entertain the masses (I felt gay life was neutered in the hugely-popular, Broadway-bound Priscilla Queen of the Desert: The Musical I saw at Toronto’s Princess of Wales Theatre two weeks ago), trans is – as America’s one-man gay-AP Rex Wockner told me last week – “the new way to terrorize the bourgeoisie. Gay is so passé.”
Or as Nina says, “I don’t differentiate between gay people and straight people anymore. I differentiate between queer people and normative people. Normative are those who buy into mainstream ideals of beauty, of where they should live and what is an acceptable lifestyle. Because gay people can now get married and adopt kids, a lot of gay people have become [conservative] too – and in some ways just as judgmental as straight people used to be. That’s an unfortunate development in [today's] gay community. I just don’t fit in.”
Still, post-surgery Nina continued to make headlines as a hostess in Toronto nightclubs, then as a columnist for the Queen City’s Fab magazine. She took it to the next level, selling out I Was Barbie at Toronto’s We’re Funny That Way comedy festival and Halifax’s Queer Acts Festival, all the while keeping her name in the news with high-profile TV appearances (including on Fashion Television, OUT TV’s The Locker Room and Kink on Showcase). Then came The Silicone Diaries in November 2009, Arsenault’s tour de force retelling of her life, from the Golden Horseshoe Trailer Park to becoming a sex worker to pay for all of her surgeries (which so far have cost her $200,000).
Silicone Diaries’ 90-minute monologue – which will be published in an upcoming anthology of queer plays by Borealis Press – also recreates Nina’s infamous “Crying Game-style collision” with Pamela Anderson’s ex-hubby, rocker Tommy Lee. “One night at Toronto’s swanky Ultra Supper Club he was in the sectioned off VIP area and the place was packed with star fuckers, silicone-enhanced women with bad extensions. These wanna-be Pamela Andersons were intentionally trying to capture his eye. I just happened to be there and he picked me out of the pack to come over and sit on his lap.”
Needless to say, the meeting ended quickly.
“Was he polite?” Nina asks rhetorically. “I think he’s a laidback guy who’s seen it all. I had the sense that he’s an adventurous guy with a wild sense of humour and a really big heart.”
“Among other things,” I crack.
Nina laughs. “Yeah, he’s really cocksure!”
In another scene from The Silicone Diaries, Nina the former sex-worker slinks onstage in a transparent dress that pretty much reveals everything cocksucking did for her (Nina hasn’t had the chop but is castrated). The way Nina has reshaped her body reminds me of Pete Burns of the 1980s Brit-pop band Dead or Alive, who says his body is an ever-changing piece of art.
“I feel the same way,” Nina says. “And from my body, I spin off other arts, like photographs of my body, or this play about my body. The next phase of my work will document the signs of aging. I don’t really see myself ever stopping. I’ve always taken pictures of every stage of my life and videotaped all of my surgical procedures.”
When I ask Nina if she still goes for touch-ups every now and then, she laughs heartily.
“Well, I didn’t go for five years! I got really sick of it, [especially after] putting all those strange dicks in my mouth [to pay for it all]!” Nina laughs again. “So I took a break. People were beginning to think I was addicted to plastic surgery and I thought I looked as good as I could possibly look. But I don’t think I could let my face age naturally at this point. Because I don’t have a natural face. Once it starts dropping I won’t look like an old woman. I’ll look quite strange, I think. We always say, ‘Once you’ve had this much work done, you’re always in the game.’”
Just like Cher and Joan Rivers. “Yeah, they’re in the game,” Nina agrees. “Imagine if Joan Rivers let that face fall and those cheeks started sliding down? It wouldn’t look right.”
This transition is at the heart of The Silicone Diaries. It’s not so much about a boy becoming a girl as it is about beauty. “My story has now become about a transition from being ugly to becoming beautiful, even if beautiful means looking plastic. At some point looking beautiful became more important than looking like a woman. It became more important than looking natural. And I don’t think my transition will ever end because my body is always changing, always aging. Losing beauty, faded beauty – I don’t think my transition will ever be over. Maybe one day I’ll even decide to get my pussy.”
Beauté plastique
from http://www.voir.ca/publishing/article.aspx?zone=1§ion=8&article=74587
9 décembre 2010
by Philippe Couture
Regardez bien ce visage. C’est celui de Nina Arsenault, née homme mais devenue cette femme-Barbie après 60 chirurgies plastiques. Un parcours “hautement spirituel” qu’elle raconte dans son spectacle solo The Silicone Diaries.
Devant ce visage de chair et de silicone, indéniablement plastique malgré sa profonde humanité, Freud aurait sans doute parlé d’”inquiétante étrangeté”. La Torontoise Nina Arsenault, dans sa quête éperdue de beauté, a choisi d’aller au bout des possibilités de la chirurgie et de faire de son corps et de son visage une oeuvre presque totalement plastique, se fabriquant une beauté de poupée Barbie dont elle revendique fièrement l’unicité.
“Au départ, dit-elle, je n’étais qu’un jeune homme désirant être une femme. Mais plus les chirurgies avançaient, plus je me rendais compte qu’il est difficile d’éliminer complètement les traces de masculinité. Il y avait deux options: soit je me contentais d’un corps transgenre, soit j’éliminais la majorité des attributs mâles et je devenais presque entièrement plastique. J’ai choisi la deuxième option parce que je savais que, personnellement, j’y trouverais la beauté que je cherchais.” Continue reading
(from http://www.tourisme-montreal.org)
NINA ARSENAULT: MOVING THROUGH THE PHASES OF LIFE
September 24, 2010
by Daniel Baylis
Art is a product and a process that expresses emotion or sentiment through various mediums such as song, painting, literature, photography, video or beyond. Some brave individuals choose their own body as their medium.
Nina Arsenault is one of these individuals.
She chats with The Conversationalist about the redesign of her body, the contradictions of life and her sentiments on making the world a better place.
The Conversationalist: Who is Nina Arsenault?
Nina Arsenault: Boy, girl, man, woman, performance artist, academic, educator, reality TV star, stripper, whore, nightlife hostess, storyteller, aesthete, art object, cyborg, icon, Barbie, fairy and actress.
What do you do?
I’m an artist. I do live performance, photography, writing and video. I think my works blurs the line between art and artist, character and actor, performance and reality.
At what point did you come to the realization that you wanted to publicize your personal transition?
In graduate school, when I began transitioning, I was taking a performance art course and the professor Yvonne Singer encouraged me to document everything that I was going through. She told me to take photos and video as well as to keep a journal. She told me that I wouldn’t be able to anticipate how I would use the work later. She reminded me that when you’re inside the intensity of a huge experience like that you don’t know what you will need to express about it afterwards.
Wow, the transition photos must be like gold to you now. So have you completed the redesign of your body?
My body will continue to age and change. I’ll have to decide as I go along what to accept and what to change. I am interested in seeing how I can age in the healthiest way possible. And also how I can look my best as I move through the different phases of life. I love Madonna’s body.
What advice do you have for others who are considering turning their physical bodies into literal expressions of art?
I lived a very marginalized life as a non-passable transsexual at the turn of the millennium in Toronto. I knew that by becoming more plastic I wouldn’t really isolate myself further in society. I knew I was smart, very creative and extremely disciplined. I was willing to devote my life to aesthetics, to beauty, whatever the cost. I was willing to sacrifice my life for beauty if need be.
Can you not, please? We want you around for a while. Okay? On your Facebook profile, it has you listed as “In a Relationship.” What does it take to date Nina Arsenault?
There are many things about my personal life that I create art about, but my relationship with my boyfriend is just for us.
Fair enough. You have said, however, that you consider Facebook and YouTube as part of your art practice, can you elaborate on that?
There was a time when I wasn’t being offered any opportunities to have my work produced. I wasn’t being taken as seriously as an artist as I wanted, but I need to keep expressing myself. Facebook and YouTube meant almost anyone, even a transsexual prostitute, could create and disseminate photography, writing and video. People noticed my stuff and kept coming back to see what I was doing. It was very inspiring and built my confidence. Artistic institutions started to notice me as well and then they wanted to work with me. These forums of communication are only superficial and silly if you treat them as such.
Hey, this Facebook-whore agrees with you! So who are your icons?
Madonna, Frida Khalo, Spalding Gray, Martha Graham, Jessica Rabbit, Andy Warhol, Barbie, Morgan Le Fay, Heiner Mueller, Bette Davis, Marina Ambromovic, Cindy Sherman, David Lynch and Lars Von Trier.
I sense that you are a woman who is fascinated by contradiction. What sort of contradictions are you observing collectively? Internally?
A contradiction I deal with now a lot is my relationship with glamour and asceticism. My work explores the reality and illusions of beauty, yet to continue with my schedule is very physically and emotionally rigorous. It demands of me a lifestyle that feels monk like. I workout. I have writing deadlines. I do my make-up. I go to skin treatments. I am constantly training as an actor. I diet very carefully. I rehearse. I coordinate my publicity. I do my stage plays. I am planning a long form video. I am devoted to a serious artistic exploration of inner and outer beauty. There is a lot of glamour in my work, but on the other hand I live like a devoted nun to achieve it. My art is my spiritual work.
Well you’re the hottest darn nun around, I can promise you that. Continuing along this line of thought, who is Nina Arsenault as a spiritual being?
I am very interested in mythology. I love the stories, and I believe there is much ancient knowledge in these archetypal narratives. Every one of us lives a series of stories, the different phases of our lives. I feel as if I have had many lives in this one life already. My spirituality is about trying to figure out which archetypal myth I am living at each phase. At different points in my life I have identified with mythological stories of Circe, Aphrodite, Morgan Le Fay, Narcissus, Artemis as well as some Egyptian goddesses. I see similarities between my life events and some of these myths. I think anyone will find similarities to mythology in their lives if they know the stories. Once I sense which story I am living then I try and decide how I want my version of that story to unfold. This elates my spirit. I feel like I am living the life my spirit wants to lead me through. This to me is the power of myth and of storytelling.
You state unapologetically that your work does not exist to make the world a better place. Yet is there a responsibility to help others navigate their own gender-based questioning?
My responsibility as an artist is to express my truth.
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NINA’S FAVOURITES:
Book for a rainy day: “The Mists of Avalon” by Marion Zimmer Bradley
Album to make love to: “Mezzanine” by Massive Attack
Clothing Designer who elicits sexiness: Cavalli
Celebrity crush: Glenn Close
Country crush: Germany
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NOW LET’S TALK MONTREAL
What can people expect when they decide to go and see “Silicone Diaries” in Montreal? Does the front row get splattered in testicle juice?
Um… no. The show is seven real life stories from my gender transition and my experiences in cosmetic surgery. Each story is a moment when I learned something about the contradictions inherent in the pursuit of inner and outer beauty.
Pretend that Toronto is a boy, and Montreal is a girl. How can we foster greater appreciation between these two beings?
I think cultural and artistic exchanges like the one between Buddies in Bad Times Theatre and Theatre Lachapelle are very important. Art is an amazing way to share language and culture.
When a beautiful gal such as you visits Montreal, what does she like to do?
I like to go to strip clubs in Montreal like Campus and Stock. The parks are beautiful. The art galleries are phenomenal.
Find more about Nina Arsenault at ninaarsenault.com.
http://www.tourisme-montreal.org/