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.Dunning, Jennifer. "Margaret Fisher in Three Pieces," The New York Times, August 16, 1981, p. 63. Retrieved February 6, 2020.Lust, Annette. "Ma Fish Dance Co," Movement Theatre Quarterly, Summer 1994.Felciano, Rita. "Artful Intellect," San Francisco Bay Guardian, September 20, 1989, p. 30. 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.Weiner, Bernard. "New Plays Festival," San Francisco Chronicle, April 11, 1982.Silver, Sam. "Margaret Fisher and the End of the Cat's Paw Palace," Theatre Magazine, Winter 1977, p. 67–8.Laine, Barry. "San Francisco Dancers Look to the East," The New York Times, August 16, 1981, Section 2, p. 12. Retrieved February 6, 2020.Herman, Kenneth. "Anti-War Ode Inspires Ma Fish Co Score," "Los Angeles Times", June 14, 1986. Retrieved February 7, 2020.
Fisher's work has been featured at the Venice Biennale,Manzella, Gianni. "La scuola di San Francisco fa capolino al carnevale di Venezia," Il Manifesto, February 21, 1980. Dance Theatre Workshop, PS1 and The Kitchen in New York,Hall, Darcy. “Dance Steps," Fusion Arts Review, June 16–30, 1983.Sommer, Sally R. "ParaReview," The Village Voice, June 8, 1982.Banes, Sally. "Choreographing Community: Dancing in the Kitchen," Dance Chronicle, 25(1), 2002, p. 143–161. SFMOMA,Ross, Janice. "'Dis' is simple, subtle, 100 percent charming," Oakland Tribune, July 11, 1989. Image Forum (Tokyo), and the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal Mue-danse Festival.Asimakopulos, Anna. "Mutating Dance.” Mirror (Montreal), February 24–March 9, 1989. It has been reviewed in The New York Times,Anderson, Jack. "Work by Miss Fisher," The New York Times, June 5, 1983, p. 53. Retrieved February 6, 2020. The Village Voice,Jowitt, Deborah. "Margaret Fisher at American Theatre Lab," The Village Voice, September 9–15, 1981. Los Angeles Times, La Repubblica,Farassino, Alberto. "Mostra del Cinema '81 Biennale di Venezia," La Repubblica, September 10, 1981. Artweek,Ross, Janice. "Variations on the Square," Artweek, December 4, 1977. San Francisco Chronicle,Stein, Ellin. "A Man's Passion for Bugs," San Francisco Chronicle, July 4, 1980, p. 49. and Dance Magazine.Bowers, Theresa. "Reviews: Nancy Lewis presents Margaret Fisher at the Kitchen," Dance Magazine, October 1979. 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." Fisher is also an independent researcher and author of books on twentieth-century performance, radio, film and poetry.Ezra Pound Society. "Margaret Fisher." Retrieved February 6, 2020.Fisher, Margaret. Ezra Pound's Radio Operas: The BBC Experiments, 1931-1933, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002. Retrieved February 7, 2020.Fisher, Margaret. Tempo as an Organizing Principle in the 1924 Film Ballet mécanique, an Analysis, and Other Essays on Modernism and Futurism, Emeryville, CA: Second Evening Art, 2016. She lives and works in Emeryville, California and was married to Robert Hughes.
Life and career Fisher was born in 1948 in Miami, Florida and grew up in a family of painters that included her mother, Ethel Fisher, and sister, Sandra Fisher Kitaj.Motika, Libby. "Painter to Painter: Ethel Fisher and R.B. Kitaj," Palisades News, Retrieved February 7, 2020.The New York Times. "Sandra Fisher, 47, Figurative Painter," Obituaries, September 23, 1994, p. B7. Retrieved February 7, 2020.Taylor, Sue. "Artist Aggrieved," ARTnews, January 1, 2019. Retrieved February 7, 2020. 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.Dunning, Jennifer. "Margaret Fisher Brings Insect-Inspired Dance to Lab," The New York Times, August 14, 1981, p. C14. Retrieved February 6, 2020. 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.
In 1976, while performing in Beth Anderson's opera Joan at the Cabrillo Music Festival, Fisher met her future husband, composer-conductor Robert Hughes, co-founder with Tom Buckner of the experimental music group Arch Ensemble.Walsh, Alex. "Robert Hughes: A Modernist Fascination," Musician's Union Local 6. Retrieved February 7, 2020.Nash, Paul. "Performance, Arch Ensemble," City Celebration, San Francisco. May, 1979. By 1978, they were collaborating on projects that would be performed in Europe, Japan, Canada, and throughout the United States.L’Unitá. "Carnevale è un uomo solo che si nota tra la folla," L’Unitá, February 19, 1980.Howe-Beck, Linde. "California dancer shows a rare, quirky sensibility," "The Gazette" (Montreal), March 13, 1989.Dillon, James. "Zero Gravity and the Image Bank, Ma Fish Co’s True and False Occult," Dance Magazine, October 1983, p. 101. In 1984, after settling in Emeryville, Fisher and Hughes co-founded MA FISH CO with artist/designer Jerry Carniglia and continued to tour internationally with new and prior works. In 1999, Fisher returned to UC Berkeley, earning MA and PhD degrees in Performance Studies (2002–3); since that time she has devoted much of her time to independent research and writing.Amazon.com. "Margaret Fisher," Author page. Retrieved February 7, 2020.
Artistic work and reception Fisher's artistic output includes experimental dance and performance, installation, film and video, and direction of new music pieces.Faust, M. "Film," Artvoice, June 17–23, 1999, p. 27.Commanday, Robert. "Shere's 'Bride': Opera About Imagining," "San Francisco Chronicle", December 3, 1984. 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.Delacoma, Wynne. "Ma Fish Co – Images of Surrealism," Chicago Sun-Times, March 1, 1986, p. 30.Alameda County Art Commission. Margaret Fisher," Alameda County Art Commission Newsletter, March 1987, p. 4.
Style and early work Fisher's performing style has been characterized as striking in presence, virtuosity and concentration, and difficult to categorize.Aloff, Mindy. "An obsessive miniaturist teases, baffles," Willamette Weekly, May 2–8, 1978, p. 4.Serle, Ellen. "Dancing Beyond Words," Bay Arts Review, March 22, 1979. Her unconventional approach—which she labels "cellular movement"—developed out of studies of yoga and contact improvisation; it is based on the body's energy impulses and movement from the joints, rather than patterns in space or movement across a stage. In addition to yoga, her inspirations include American, Italian and Japanese sign language, martial arts, and Bharatanatyam dance. Critics note as unique to her choreography: chiseled, repetitive gestural isolations that create tension and a sense of pent-up energy;P.S. "Performance. Margaret Fisher," Scena, April 1981. a focus on smaller body parts (hands, fingers, toes, face, neck) rather than the torso for kinetic expression; rhythmic patterns akin to language, poetry or jazz;Art Dimension. "Reviews. Performance," Art Dimension, January–March 1979.Ammann, Jean Christophe. "Was sind das: Tanz-Performances?" Vaterland, May 12, 1982.Palmer, Robert. "East and West Meet on Stage," The New York Times, May 16, 1978. and movement on a horizontal, pictorial-like plane.Weiner, Bernard. "Curtain Calls," San Francisco Chronicle, March 29, 1983.
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.Robertson, Allen. "T e c h n o - c r a f t," The Soho News August 25, 1981, p. 43.Ross, Janice. "Dance's pioneers head east," Oakland Tribune, October 25, 1981. Critic Charles Shere noted Fisher's approach to using the stage as an area to develop parallel messages (rather than a space to move through), which typically assigned equal weight to elements such as object, light, gesture, rhythm, body, image, sound and word.Shere, Charles. "New work shows Fisher at her best," Oakland Tribune, March 29, 1983. 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.Anderson, Jack. "Ag Nature," The New York Times, March 21, 1985, p. C13. Retrieved February 6, 2020.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.Wetzler, Rachel. "Send/Receive: Liza Bear and Willoughby Sharp After Avalanche," Rhizome, November 29, 2012.Video Data Bank. "Send/Receive I, and Send/Receive II," Catalog. Retrieved February 7, 2020.Cohn, Terri. "Sharon Grace," SFAQ, Issue 16, 2014. Retrieved February 6, 2020. Fisher's solo suite, Splitting (1977–82), featured an evolving, increasingly complex movement languageBochenek, Gail. "Two Performance Pieces by Margaret Fisher," The Drama Review, December 1980. that combined immediacy and improvisation, with "moments of bizarre, dadaist lunacy" (involving plucked chickens and a harmonica, among other elements);Clemens, Michael. "Bugged Room," The Daily Californian, March 16, 1979.Romano, Serena. "Maschere romane e mimi dall’America" (Biennale di Venezia), Giornale di Sicilia, February 17, 1980. critic Robert Palmer described it as a fascinating, non-linear work whose flow and rhythmic drive suggested contemporary jazz. The dream-like, minimal performances Gli Insetti and Il Miglior Fabbro (1978–89) referenced the works of entomologist Jean Henri Fabre and offered divergent takes on the scientist's relationship to his object of study. They featured Hughes as "Arturo Scienziato" and Fisher as a woman/insect traversing her life-cycle through movements reviewers termed alternately grotesque, hilarious, and rapacious; composer Robert Ashley called Fisher's choreography, "the most authoritative demonstration of the mechanics of insect movement."Stofflet, Mary. "Theater as Canvas," Artweek, August 16, 1980, p. 15–6.Ross, Janice. "Symphony Director, Eastbay Dancer Team in Performance Art," Oakland Tribune, July 11, 1980.
In The True and False Occult (1980–2), Fisher explored new relationships between time, space and language to suggest zero-gravity movement, floating heads on a pilgrimage to Mt. Fuji, text poured from a teapot, calligraphy exercises for disembodied hands, and swimming through water (by means of a mylar pool); Dance critic Jennifer Dunning compared its "bizarre but magical world" to the "interior of a Joseph Cornell box in its simplicity, playfulness and inviting privacy."