The Pink Detachment (2015)

The Pink Detachment

2015

Synopsis

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.

Credits

Director

Jen Liu

Cast

Corey Tazmania as Narrator

Eli Condon as Company Dancer

Isabelle Zufferey Boulton as Narrator

Jasmine Hong as Company Dancer

Katharine Liu as Accident-Prone Worker

Maura Harris as Company Dancer

Mayu Oguri as Manager Ballerina

Nathalie Encarnacion as Company Dancer