THE PINK: A PAPER RITUAL OF EROS
The opening section of Muna Tseng’s evening-length The Pink: A Paper Ritual of Eros, based on a 16th-century Chinese erotic novel, contains many hints of what’s to come. Nudity. Foot fetishism, especially in the highly developed form fostered by foot binding. The essential vulnerability of human beings, and the equivocal nature of coverings. The paper that dominates the piece–there are paper costumes, paper musical instruments, and a paper set–was described by a dancer during a discussion afterward as a sort of conduit; press materials said Tseng uses paper “as the symbol for erotic tension.” But the women’s paper breastplates are almost military, spiky and stiff, and to me paper came to represent the protective but often corrupt cultural guises human sexuality often assumes.
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You could see the end of The Pink coming a mile away. The final section is called “You and Me, the Pink,” and sure enough, all 13 dancers get naked in a sequence that suggests the passage to death just as surely as the opening section suggests birth. The penultimate section parodies the sexual posturing of fashion models: the dancers adopt modern dress–silky baby-doll pajamas for most of the women, military-style jackets (and, except for jockstraps, only jackets) for the men. They strut upstage and down as if on a runway; one man even moons us. The section ends with a shrieking woman on stilts who has a very loud orgasm after a man sticks his head between her legs. The patent obscenity of this circuslike section–which suggests that covering the body, as the fashion world does so obsessively, is itself corrupt–sets us up for the dancers’ final nakedness. In a trope that isn’t exactly new, Tseng makes nudity the equivalent of innocence.
The piece is filled with strange juxtapositions and changes in tone. The focal point of a section in which a woman is carried and swooped about, Gerald Arpino-style, by five men is her pitiable halting stagger across the stage: with her feet mutilated by the culture, she’s the victim of her own beauty, entirely helpless and dependent on men. Yet Tseng follows up this rather bitter commentary with a lighthearted duet for a man and a woman who create little bumps in an unrolled carpet of paper and blow them back and forth at each other like waves–as evocative an image as I’ve seen of the fragile, playful, slightly competitive nature of sexual arousal. A section in which a man (Gremo) appears to have a conversation with a woman’s legs, or actually with her toes, is accompanied by a shadowy image behind an upstage screen of a man kissing a woman’s feet; then the downstage woman clasps the man about the waist with her legs in what looks like a death grip, and he raises his flute as if to stab her; this is followed by a section for several seated couples who essentially use their legs and feet to flirt.
