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.