BUDDIES IN BAD TIMES THEATRE hosts a performance intervention that offers a distinctly queer perspective of the museum experience. Inspired by anthropological imagery, iconic queer performers will infiltrate the ROYAL ONTARIO MUSEUM to act as living specimens of queer identities and cultures.

Presented as part of the Friday Night Live event OUT, which also features a sneak peek at the 2012 INSIDEOUT FILM FESTIVAL.

Friday May 18th, 6pm – 9pm

(ABOVE) a photo from the show “Nina Arsenault: take the fear away and allow me to serve” –digital c-print on Fuji Crystal Archive

SUBMISSION
“Presented in a darkroom created specifically for the show, “Submission” exhibits sexually explicit material, reflecting on a role of pornography in Queer identity and blending role of explicit images in self-portraits, The images draw the viewer into a game of voyeur and exhibitionist filled with erotic charge and tension, guaranteed to arouse.”

THE GLOBE AND MAIL RECOMMENDS “SUBMISSION”
It wouldn’t be CONTACT without one “dirty show.” Bogdanovic’s nudes, however, only fit that dismissive description if you ignore his obvious steeping in the history of erotic photography and his subsequent discovery that nudes are never about sex; they are about power: the power to make you look or look away. Adding to this gaze-owning game, Bogdanovic has set the photos in a pitch-black room, and asks the viewers to see them via flashlights – thus making us, the viewers, the only ones who can decide what we see, or don’t. Sexy and smart.
(written by RM Vaughn)

May 14th- 27th 2012

Opening Reception
May 15th 2012 at 7pm

Buddies In Bad Times Theatre
12 Alexander St, Toronto

 

(A COUPLE MORE PHOTOS FROM THE SHOW)

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Intellect Books is delighted to invite you to the launch of our ground-breaking publication TRANS(per)FORMING Nina Arsenault: An Unreasonable Body of Work, a new book edited by award winning dramaturg Judith Rudakoff.

In TRANS(per)FORMING Nina Arsenault, 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.

The book contains scholarly essays and accessible articles written by critics and artists, 35 full colour photographs documenting Arsenault’s transformation and her many personae. It also includes a series of poems written by Arsenault while performing in the Yukon, a conversation about her sex work with her former pimp, and analysis of her acting from Cynthia Ashperger -North America’s leading authority on the Michael Chekov Acting Technique. There are also pieces by leading scholars from a variety of fields including performance studies, women’s studies, gender studies and even an eminent Biblical scholar from Israel who responds to the melding of the spiritual and the profane in Arsenault’s work.

On the night of the book launch Nina Arsenault will perform an excerpt from The Silicone Diaries and both she and Judith will be available for book signing. Books will be available to purchase on the night.

The event will take place on May 4th from 7-10pm at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, 12 Alexander Street, Toronto.

See the Store section of this website for information about online purchasing of TRANS(per)FORMING Nina Arsenault: An Unreasonable Body of Work.

TRANS(per)FORMING Nina Arsenault: An Unreasonable Body of Work is available at Theatre Books in Toronto.

TheatreBooks is located one block west of Bay St. at 11 St. Thomas Street, just south of Bloor St., across from the Windsor Arms Hotel. The store is equidistant from the Bay Street subway station on the Bloor/Danforth line or the Museum station on the Yonge/University line (two blocks west at Charles St. and University Ave.) (416) 922-7175

For online North American orders, please visit the University of Chicago Press website (our US book distributor), and order online by typing the title TRANS(per)FORMING Nina Arsenault into the search box and adding to shopping cart.

Intellect Books can also be ordered from Amazon,Blackwell, Borders, Waterstones and a host of other sellers. It is easiest to directly order titles by visiting Google Book Search, typing in the ISBN or title of the book you would like to order, then clicking on one of the links underneath ‘order from a bookstore’ in the right hand column.

Book description:
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.

Everything You’ve Ever Wanted to Say About Theatre but Were Afraid to Put in Print is the title of the 150th anniversary issue of Canadian Theatre Review.  A series of Canadian performance artists were asked to write manifestos of their art practice.

Canadian Theatre Review is the major magazine of record for Canadian theatre. It is committed to excellence in the critical analysis and innovative coverage of current developments in Canadian theatre, to advocating new issues and artists, and to publishing at least one significant new playscript per issue. The editorial board is committed to CTR’s practice of theme issues that present multi-faceted and in-depth examinations of the emerging issues of the day and to expanding the practice of criticism in Canadian theatre and to the development of new voices.

Below is the abstract for my manifesto. You can read the other manifestos in the issue by clicking on the following link:

Manifestos Canadian Theatre Review 150

If you need a subscription to Canadian Theatre Review you will have to click here though first!

 

Manifesto of Living Self-portraiture – Identity, Transformation and Performance
(Abstract)

In an era when blogging, Facebook, and Twitter are more and more becoming the ubiquitous means of expression for an entire generation, The Manifesto of Living Self-portraiture illuminates the potential and power of self-representation through the highly personal art practice of queer transsexual Nina Arsenault. Arsenault’s unfolding creative work begins with the documentation of her sixty cosmetic procedures which transformed her body into a 36D-28-42 self-portrait of hyperfemininity. Her subsequent numerous nightlife appearances, photo shoots, videos, and theatrical performances chart the trajectory of her constant and perpetual transformations and by inference illuminate cultural values of beauty, sexuality, and the power of spirituality. Furthermore, Arsenault’s discipline incorporates voice/breath/body training, contemporary self-help manuals, and ongoing research into art and mythology to vivify herself as living Goddess archetypes. Arsenault’s life as self-portraiture, created at the nexus point of fantasy and reality, becomes a sacred drama of transfiguration in a society which seeks to minimize her passion and pathologize her identity.

performing my short play i was Barbie, which I presented as the first act of Queer Art Diva: an evening of selected monologues, writings, video and photographic art — produced by Saint John Theatre Company in their Studio Theatre. special thanks to BMO Financial Group!

Over 400 people came out for this evening of creativity, performance, books and community, celebrating the Glad Day Book Store’s new generation of proprietors. There were lots of wonderful performers – burlesque, modern dance, poets, writers, actors. I told my “Me ‘n’ Tommy Lee” story, but, first, I read a poem called Reflection that I wrote on one of my trips to the Yukon.

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REFLECTION
January 29, 2011, Whitehorse, Yukon Territory
on Air North Flight 506, Seat 13A
Descending into Erik Neilson Whitehorse Airport

In the sky, outside the triple thick fibreglass window,
the light scintillates through the windswept clouds.
Moving in fast forward, digital stop motion,
over the mountains,
onto the planes of snow
with jutting rocks,
smooth ice, pointed stone,
the light illuminates cracks,
and smooth, fast moving shadows and light.

The woman next to me, approximately sixty-five years old, says
“Isn’t it beautiful? God is talking to us.”

Behind her sagging face,
beneath my silicone,
we are safe together.

She cannot judge me and continue to glow,
a halo of light around her head.
Nor can she stop the radiance in her eyes
to anticipate that I will judge her.

We have eye contact,
like lakes of frozen water high in the mountains,
reflecting sunlight back to the sky.

We turn back to the view from above,
and we stare in silence
at the whirling clouds,
the sky,
the snow,
the exposed jagged rock,
and glints of light.

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****Reflection is from a series of poems called Landscape with Yukon and Unnatural Beauty. They are edited by Judith Rudakoff and will be published by Intellect Books in TRANS(per)FORMING Nina Arsenault: An Unreasonable Body of Work

(see Store section of this website for more info)