The Pink Detachment

Directed by Jen Liu

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.