Mauve Bird with Yellow Teeth Red Feathers Green Feet and a Rose Belly, PART BLUE is a performance and immersive psychological landscape by Tamar Ettun and her performance group The Moving Company. Using dance, sound, vast colors, and everyday object assemblages, Ettun seeks to locate a bodily impulse for empathy. This marks the first part of a performance tetralogy, each associated with colors and seasons (Blue/Winter, Red/Spring, Yellow/Summer, Orange/Fall). A new installment will premiere each year until the completion of the project in 2018.

PART BLUE starts as a still formal sculpture, in which the movers are bound to one another as an apparatus made of humans and objects. The elements lean against one another, so the connections among objects and humans are necessary but tenuous; if anyone were to let go, the machine would collapse on itself entirely. The performers begin to mirror each other’s movements, eventually leaving their places in the system. Each one develops her own unique set of repetitive movements emanating from her object. This piece confronts our own mechanized psychological defenses with accumulated gestures. Through contradiction and complement in stillness and movement, viewers are invited to enter the moving installation, while the various scenes and the performers/movers mirror each other in search of primal empathy.

This performance follows Tamar Ettun’s solo exhibition at Fridman Gallery in NYC, featuring sculptural and video portions of this project.

The Moving Company performers: Maia Karo, Laura Bernstein , Sabrina Shapiro , Rebecca Pristoop , Tina Wang , Mor Mendel, Tamar Ettun. Costume design by Ella Dagan