Margaret Fisher

Margaret Fisher (born 1948) is an American performance and media artist best known for interdisciplinary works that pair gestural choreography to experimental visual theater characterized by a cartoon aesthetic with wide-ranging cultural references. She emerged amid a 1970s Bay Area experimental performance scene that included artists such as Lynn Hershman Leeson, George Coates, Bill Irwin and Winston Tong, and co-founded the intermedia production group MA FISH CO and the alternative theater Cat's Paw Palace in Berkeley.

Fisher's work has been featured at the Venice Biennale, Dance Theatre Workshop, PS1 and The Kitchen in New York, SFMOMA, Image Forum (Tokyo), and the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal Mue-danse Festival. It has been reviewed in The New York Times, The Village Voice, Los Angeles Times, Artweek, San Francisco Chronicle, and Dance Magazine. Critic Rita Felciano describes Fisher's approach as one of "artful intellect" and her multimedia pieces as "demanding puzzles, tightly structured and pervaded by a stillness and internal quiet." She lives and works in Emeryville, California and was married to Robert Hughes. Her father, Gene Fisher, co-founded F&R Builders in 1954, which became Lennar in 1971 after his departure. In 1966, she attended the University of California, Berkeley where she earned a degree in criminology (AB, 1969) while also learning hatha yoga. In the 1970s, she studied dance and choreography with Margaret Jenkins and contact improvisation with Steve Paxton, co-founded Cat's Paw Palace (1973), and began performing in experimental works of her own and others, such as Alison Knowles, Jim Nollman and George Coates. By 1978, they were collaborating on projects that would be performed in Europe, Japan, Canada, and throughout the United States. Some of her most widely discussed early works were performed under her own name (often in collaboration with Hughes) and later reworked by MA FISH CO; from 1983 onward, she developed work both within MA FISH CO and with outside collaborators.

Style and early work Fisher's performing style has been characterized as striking in presence, virtuosity and concentration, and difficult to categorize. and movement on a horizontal, pictorial-like plane.

Fisher's early works integrated her idiosyncratic choreography with multimedia technology (low and high), music and poetry, disparate literary and pictorial references, and an introspective sensibility. The New York Times'''s Jack Anderson described Fisher's early performances as interesting, if obscure, "kinetic puzzles" proceeding by means of metamorphosis, free association, private jokes and far-flung allusions. Send/Receive (1977, with Liza Béar, Richard Lowenberg, Willoughby Sharp and Keith Sonnier) demonstrated Fisher's embrace of technology; it used a NASA CTS satellite—the first artist-initiated project to do so—to facilitate a performance in which Fisher (in San Francisco) and Nancy Lewis (in New York) responded to one another's movements in real time. Fisher's solo suite, Splitting (1977–82), featured an evolving, increasingly complex movement language critic Robert Palmer described it as a fascinating, non-linear work whose flow and rhythmic drive suggested contemporary jazz.

MA FISH CO, The Bride Stripped Bare by her bachelors even… (1984), Performance still from 1986. Pictured left to right, Tony Gnazzo, Larry London, Jerry Carniglia, Bob Hughes, Toyoji Tomita. Costumes by Cynthia DuVal

MA FISH CO MA FISH CO (founded in 1983) brought together Fisher's direction, performance and choreography, Hughes's electronic and acoustic music scores, and Jerry Carniglia's stage design and sculptures in performances, installations and mixed-media works that increasingly incorporated video, slide projection, and the participation of performer-technicians. The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even (1984) was an experimental, dadaist opera that Fisher choreographed and designed for composer Charles Shere (later re-conceived independently by Fisher for MA FISH CO in 1994).

Three interdisciplinary performance works—AG Nature (1983–9), Antebellum Bedlam (1985–6) and Vice Versa (1986–8)—investigate historically determined "crimes against nature" (usury, sodomy, war), themes drawn from the writings of Dante and Pound, and imagery inspired during Fisher's fellowship year in Japan.

Fisher's performance and film and video archive, including that of MA FISH CO, is housed at the New York Public Library Jerome Robbins Dance Division.

MA FISH CO, Ag Nature (1983–9). Performance still, 1985. Pictured: Julius Webster as Pulcinella at Dance Theatre Workshop, New York City, 1985. Sets by Jerry Carniglia, costumes by Jacqueline Humbert

Film & video collaborations Fisher/MA FISH CO's film and video projects have screened internationally (Image Forum Tokyo, Mill Valley Film Festival, Centre Pompidou) and earned experimental film awards from the Venice Biennale (Liquid Movie, 1981, with Fabrizio Plessi), Sony Visions of America, and the Milan and Montreal film festivals, among others.

MA FISH CO describes its heavily layered films as "faux-foreign"—shot in foreign languages with English subtitles and designed with a foreign-film aesthetic (e.g., the grainy, Russian-influenced The Üble Marionette, 1992). The Letter P, The Story of Pulcinella (1997) combines puppets and live action, music and text in a poetic, allusion-filled re-imagining of the Italian commedia dell'arte figure Pulcinella that explores historical connections to European anti-Semitism and themes of ghettoization and survival. The space was a venue for experimental dance, theater, music, poetry, performance, video and film, that emphasized collaboration, improvisation, audience proximity and dialogue. MA FISH CO, Antebellum Bedlam, Performance still, 1985. Pictured: Dominica Kriz at KALA Institute, Berkeley, CA, 1985

Writing and publishing Since 2002, Fisher has written as an academic and independent researcher (often collaborating with Hughes), publishing on twentieth–century performance, film, radio and poetry, including books on futurism and the music of Ezra Pound; In 2012, Fisher also published her English translation of RADIA by Italian Futurist poet and playwright Pino Masnata with introduction and appendices. and the books, Encyclopedia of Ezra Pound (2005), Ezra Pound in Context (2009), and The Companion to Ezra Pound and the Arts (2019). She has also contributed to the books, Futurism and the Technological Imagination (2009) and Handbook of International Futurism (2019), and the journals, Italogramma, Modernism/Modernity, and Conjunctions.

Awards and recognition Fisher has been recognized for her artistic and academic work. She received an Ezra Pound Society Lifetime Achievement Award with Robert Hughes (2013), an American Academy in Rome Prize for Modern Italian Studies (2009), and a Civitella Ranieri Foundation visiting scholar residency for her research and writing. As an artist, she was awarded three National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Choreographer Fellowships, three NEA Interarts Project awards, a California Arts Council Fellowship, a Djerassi Foundation Bessie Schönberg Fellowship, and commissions for new works by the KALA Institute, Jerome Foundation, Opera at the Institute/PS1, and Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, among others. Fisher has also received a Japan-U.S. Artist Exchange Fellowship, a Fulbright-Hays Research Award to Italy, and travel awards and artist residencies from Djerassi, Exploratorium in San Francisco, Giovanni Poli's Teatro L'Avogaria (Venice), and Lake Placid Center for the Arts (1983).

Selected published works "Radio and Sound Art," in Handbook of International Futurism. Berghaus, Ed. (2019). "The Expansion of a Theory: Great Bass and Ballet mécanique," in The Companion to Ezra Pound and the Arts. Preda, Ed. (2019). Tempo as an Organizing Principle in the 1924 Film Ballet mécanique, an Analysis, and Other Essays on Modernism and Futurism (2016). The Transparency of Ezra Pound's Great Bass (2013). The Echo of Villon in Ezra Pound’s Music and Poetry, Ezra Pound’s Duration Rhyme (2013). RADIA, A Gloss of the 1933 Futurist Radio Manifesto by Pino Masnata. Editor, Introduction, Translation (2012). Le Testament, 1923 facsimile edition with audio CD. With Ezra Pound and Robert Hughes (2011). ; audio CD "Futurism and Radio," in Futurism and the Technological Imagination. Berghaus, Ed. (2009). Le Testament, Paroles de Villon, 1926 and 1933 performance editions. With Ezra Pound and Robert Hughes (2008). The Recovery of Ezra Pound's Third Opera, Settings of poems by Catullus and Sappho (2005). Cavalcanti: A Perspective on the Music of Ezra Pound. With Ezra Pound and Robert Hughes (2003). Ezra Pound's Radio Operas, The BBC Experiments, 1931–1933 (2002). Palm Leaf Patterns'' (1976).