The Pink Detachment

The Pink Detachment is an update of “The Red Detachment of Women” (1964), a Model Opera from China’s Cultural Revolution. Here the protagonists are an accident-prone worker and a ballerina-manager who has the tools to alleviate the worker’s problems. At the center of the piece is the color equation, Red + White = Pink, from which multiple parallel meanings emerge. The first is the old term “pinko,” meaning a watered down Communism, or a liberal with uncommitted Red sympathies. The second is a proposal to solve future crises in meat supply by re-valuating hot dog and sausage production as a solution, by integrating ‘undesirable’ portions of pig with the ‘desirable’ portions, embodying perfect equivalence in consumable form. And the third is pink as femininity – not as a ‘natural’ fleshy softness, but rather a synthetic, engineered (and potentially violent) hybridity.

Cast

Katharine Liu Accident-Prone Worker

Mayu Oguri Manager Ballerina

Corey Tazmania Narrator Isabelle Zufferey Boulton Narrator

Eli Condon Company Dancer

Jasmine Hong Company Dancer

Nathalie Encarnacion Company Dancer

Maura Harris Company Dancer

Sorcha Fatooh Company Dancer

Metadata from the source database.