Jen Liu

Jen Liu, Pink Slime Caesar Shift: Electropore, 2021 (work in progress)

What can power do when it’s locked inside a closed system?

Four Black and Asian womxn in four spaces supply the energy and feedback for each other’s work. This could be said to be the foundation of a practical coalition politic. Discussions of coalition almost inevitably focus on goals, rightly so. But goals sublimate differences, and if that’s allowed to go on long enough, the body (politic) might explode. So: outside of the limelight, outside the speculative and the theoretical, what do Black and Asian womxn share?

Just a slight change in perspective changes the story. Four nameless Black and Asian womxn form a closed system of electric generation, for meaningless gadgets. Their bio-power powers the infinite disposable whatever.

These womxn share a life of narrow spans of movement, confined imaginaries, impossibly reduced windows of time, the body horror of a self compressed into bits of fixed knowledge, shareable trauma PDFs, tragedy spectacle service work, and emotional capital turned into current. Is there hope for a coalition politic there? At least it begins with looking at what is shared directly in the face.

Fred Ho and Ann T. Greene’s Warrior Sisters: The New Adventures of African and Asian Womyn Warriors (presented at The Kitchen in 2000) is"the imaginary meeting of four legendary female revolutionaries": Fa Mulan, Nana Yaa Asantewaa, and Sieh King King, who come to aid of Assata Shakur. With flashes of time- and space-altering lightning, made by the magic of Fa Mulan, Shakur escapes safely to Cuba.

But you, in real life: your lightning’s been stolen. It’s been absorbed into the network grid. Here you find yourself sitting alone in a pod, always alone, a never-ending list of tasks that will only deliver you back to where you are right now, no escape. Meanwhile, every part of you is being used – you have to offer up every part of you on the marketplace, as if nothing could bring you more joy.

Electropore is a container for multiple threads of research and development. Its structure originates in the ongoing body of work, Pink Slime Caesar Shift, and the genetic engineering process of electroporation, a method of introducing new DNA through electroshocking living cells in pink solution. This piece “applies” the electroshock method to Warrior Sisters, drawing together elements from its libretto and musical composition, “electroshocking” them through design harmonization, midi transcription, and acid house digitization.

—Jen Liu

Archival Materials Related to Warrior Sisters

Liu selected the archival materials below as a way to consider Warrior Sisters as an ongoing collaboration between composer and musician Fred Ho, librettist Ann T. Greene, and the other members of the production team—shared labor that ran parallel to the premise of the opera itself: future-building in coalition. By highlighting these working documents from the archive, the links between production and archival preservation become visible.