Heaven's Dark Side

Based in Emeryville CA with her performance and production group MAFISHCO, choreographer and director Margaret Fisher creates experimental work realized in high and low/vintage tech. See https://mafishco.com/performanceart_HDS.htm Her early work included a bi-coastal dance with choreographer Nancy Lewis, a first for satellite transmission, as well as thermographic video cartoons with Richard Lowenberg. The 1980s through the 2010s featured a multi-image orchestra (slide animations), film (S8,16mm) and a trilogy of “faux foreign” videos (shot in Russian, Italian, Arabic and Hebrew, with English subtitles). Recent work includes repurposed film projectors as footwear and a robotic heron. Heaven’s Dark Side (2026) brings together performance art and installation, shadow play, and graphic novel as a video essay. She studied dance with Margaret Jenkins, film with David Heintz, and holography with Lloyd Cross and Fred Unterseher. Returning to graduate school at the end of the 1990s, she studied film with Trinh T. Min-Ha and Kathy Geritz.

Fisher is the recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Japan-U.S. Exchange Fellowship, the Fulbright Commission, and California Arts Council, among others. Fisher’s work Emigre, a stop-frame animation from 1974 is now in the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Liquid Movie, a 1981 collaboration with visual artist Fabrizio Plessi, captured Best Experimental Film at the Venice Biennale Film Festival (while facing rejection in the U.S. for its one-camera approach). Other collaborations include Saxophone (1976) with composer John Adams; and The Letter P, the Story of Pulcinella with composer Robert Hughes (awards from Sony Visions of America, JVC Tokyo Video Festival, Mill Valley Videofest, and more).

She published several in-depth analyses of iconic modernist film, radio, and music works: “Tempo as an Organizing Principle in the 1924 Film Ballet mecanique”; Radia, the 1933 Futurist Radio Manifesto; Ezra Pound’s Radio Operas: the BBC Experiments 1931–1933 (MIT Press, 2002), and Ezra Pound’s Third Opera, Collis O Heliconii. The latter includes her arrangements of Pound’s unfinished opera (heard in Heaven’s Dark Side).

Jim Cave, Director and Lighting Designer, currently is a core member of Word for Word Performing Arts Company. He has directed Aurora Theatre, Eureka Theatre, and The Traveling Jewish Theatre, among other groups. He was Tour Manager for Anna Halprin. He lives in Berkeley, California.