Brave New World
Katherine Helen Fisher is a contemporary dance and performance art superstar. As a dancer, she’s worked with MOMIX, ODC, Bob Wilson, Lucinda Childs, RadioHead, and even run her own Emmy Award-nominated dance production company, Safety Third. Now in her mid-forties, she’s reimagining her relationship to her body as an artist, and pioneering new ground at the intersection of dance, performance, and technology.
Settling in at the Human Resources gallery in Los Angeles and preparing to witness Katherine Helen Fisher’s A Cyborg’s Mirror: Bodies in Hyperreality, I knew two things: There was going to be an AI component and there was going to be “graphic” nudity.
My friends and I clutched our cups of overpriced wine and surveyed the crowd. The event was an iteration of curator Emily Barasch’s performance art series, First Drafts LA. The audience was an eclectic mix of art-lovers, both chic and casual. The gallery maintained a simple white box aesthetic with floor pillows and folding chairs. The no frills atmosphere added to the down-to-earth and non-self conscious vibe the Los Angeles visual art scene is famous for.
Later, to me, Kate would praise this exact milieu: “I love the visual art world here. There’s something that goes on in Los Angeles, where you know the New York Times is not going to be there. They’re just not. For better or for worse. It allows people to have a little more freedom to experiment.”
As Kate’s piece began, it became clear that it would, in fact, deliver in terms of AI and nudity, but what would prove most intriguing was the piece’s use of audience participation.
Utilizing what Kate calls “The Cyborg Feminist Interface–” developed in collaboration with technologists Shimmy Boyle and Mingyong Cheng– spectators were invited to generate prompts for the piece which were then delivered to the real-time image generating AI in communication with a camera filming the performers. In split screen, we saw both the dance as the camera was recording it, as well as the AI augmented livestream. The result was a compelling three-way conversation between the performer, the audience, and the internet itself. While many themes within the traditional dance and performance art cannon were present –transformation/metamorphosis, exploitation, identity, bias, contemporary humanity– it was the piece’s invitation for the collective audience hive mind to experiment that felt most exciting. The piece ran for about 10 minutes, but I could have watched it unfold for hours.
It felt as if we had all just witnessed the breaking of new ground.
Needing to know more about Kate, as well as the piece itself, I begged to sit down with her to discuss what led to this point in both her career and artistic vision.
Photo Credit: Anastasia Velicescu Katherine Helen Fisher’s Cyborg Mirror at First Draft LA 2024
Like most dancers, Kate began her career in early childhood.
“At three-years-old, I was bouncing around like crazy,” Kate recalled. “My mom was like, ‘She’s driving me crazy, I need to get her out of the house.’ She put me in dance class. It was just something I always excelled at. I’m dyslexic so there were a lot of other areas in my life where I felt I wasn’t living up to normal expectations of what children should be able to do. I didn’t really learn to read till I was in 4th grade, and I tried to hide that. But in the dance studio, I was always picked out for being excellent. It was the way that I felt I could best express myself. I fell in love with dance and became very dedicated to it. My parents would punish me by saying, ‘You can’t go to ballet!’”
“We generally think of dancers as coming from pretty privileged backgrounds,” I said. “But that wasn’t the case in your story.”
“No,” she said, laughing. “I grew up in inner-city Baltimore. Like, The Wire Baltimore.”
“How did you manage to get the education necessary to launch your career?” I asked.
“My mom took me to a tiny little dance studio,” she began. “When she realized how much I loved it, she became a great advocate for me; taking me around, getting scholarships, speaking for me, ‘My daughter can really dance! Let her study here!’ I studied at little dolly-dinkle dance studios until high school. I got into the Baltimore School for the Arts, which is a free public arts high school in Baltimore city. Students from all over the region audition to get in and it’s talent-based admission. You have students from the inner city and the suburbs, from all socioeconomic backgrounds, coming together to learn within this small, intense conservatory model. Jada Pinkett went there, Tupac went there, Christian Siriano went there; so many amazing artists from different disciplines went there. It totally changed my life. I was dancing six hours a day and doing competitive academics. It was there that I finally started getting into studying and reading more. I realized that if I wanted to get into a good school I needed good grades. I really blossomed.”
Performing with the Moscow State Ballet in Baltimore, 1993
Along with her mother, other figures stepped into Kate’s life to help facilitate the progression of her dance career.
“The ball player Cal Ripken’s family saw me dance and offered me a scholarship to attend NYU through the Tisch School of the Arts,” she said with gratitude. “It is also a conservatory style dance school. I met so many amazing teachers and artists.”
“Did you immediately join a company after college?” I asked.
“I started freelancing right out of school,” she explained. “I stepped into an understudy role at the Joyce. The life of a freelance dancer in New York City, you know, you’re walking up five flights of stairs to attend one rehearsal, and you have three or four rehearsals a day. For a couple of years I made maybe six or seven thousand dollars annually, which I was able to live on because I had found a cheap rent-controlled apartment near the Brooklyn Naval Yard. I was going to these big cattle call auditions and not making the cut– getting pretty far, but not making the cut. I was like, ‘I’m not getting the jobs I want.’ So, that is when I started choreographing my own work in earnest.”
Photo Credit: Texme Yeste for Numero China
Through these self-produced dance pieces Kate began gaining notoriety within the Downtown art scene, finding a breakthrough with a memorial piece to her uncle.
“My uncle Andrew Fisher died in 9/11; he was in one of the towers,” she said. “I made a really beautiful solo dedicated to his life. I started showing that around at different Downtown galleries and people saw me doing my own work and I started getting much bigger dance company jobs. I always tell my students, ‘If you feel like you don’t have a vehicle, make one.’ That practice has sustained me in my career. That performance you saw in LA is a great example of that; just going back to basics and saying, ‘Who am I? What is this body? What can I do for myself?’ Instead of waiting for external opportunities.”
As critics and audiences alike began to take interest, her career took off.
“From there, I got three dance company jobs offered to me at the same time,” she explained. “I had to choose which one to take. I remember a friend of mine was like, ‘You better make this choice wisely!’ But I just chose the one that paid the most and had the most international travel, which was with a company called MOMIX. It’s a little bit like Cirque du Soleil; it’s commercial dance, it’s not really ‘high art,’ but it’s extremely physically demanding. I toured the world with them. That first year I performed almost 300 times. We would perform eight times a week. My first tour was in Madrid for six weeks, then New Zealand. It was my first time traveling extensively and it was awesome. There’s something about that kind of show schedule where you just get so clear on how to perform and reach an audience. It really helped me hone my skills.”
“I know for a lot of dancers that kind of performance schedule becomes pretty monotonous,” I said. “Didn’t you find yourself becoming bored?”
“Maybe it ties into my dyslexia,” she said, laughing. “But I always really loved doing pieces over and over and over again. I find the [repetition] allows me to access different spiritual states. I always found myself having epiphanies– relaxing into the material and playing with it, playing with the audience, taking risks. The biggest drawback to that model is injury, which is ultimately why I left the company. I was doing a solo with these crazy knee turns, every woman who had had the solo had ended up needing knee surgery, and I too ended up needing knee surgery at 26. I was like, ‘I can’t keep doing this.’”
“After you’ve toured the world with a company that famous, where do you even go from there?” I asked.
“I went and worked with a bunch of other big name dance companies,” she said. “I was at ODC in San Francisco when my partner at the time was like, ‘I want to move back to New York.’ So, I moved back and went to this audition line. I was 28 and thought I was washed up. I thought, ‘I’m done as a dancer.’ I showed up at 8 AM in the dead of January and there were 400 women already there to audition for Lucinda Childs. I called my partner saying, ‘I am not staying in this line.’ She said, ‘Stay in the line! Stay in the line!’ I ended up landing the job.”
“What was the show?” I asked.
“We were getting ready to put up the Phillip Glass opera Einstein on the Beach,” she explained. “Bob Wilson directed it and Lucinda Childs did the choreography. It’s a five hour avant garde opera that was made in 1976 that changed the face of contemporary performance. Working with Bob Wilson gave me exposure to performance art in a meaningful way– he had been collaborating with Marina Abramovic and other boundary-pushing performance artists. I toured with Einstein on the Beach for six years! We went all over the world and I had a fabulous time. Lucinda Childs’ work has always had a huge impact on me. Her work has given me the courage to think, ‘I can be a badass choreographer who is successful. Why not me?’
Photo credit: Jose Tutes for Cameras and Dancers, 2017
Breaking into the high art dance world at that level started opening doors that Kate had yet to dream of.
“I started meeting a lot of important people who helped me secure funding for my own work,” she said. “I made my first dance film, Finite and Infinite Games. From there, I realized I loved making films and started a production company called Safety Third and started making a lot of dance films. We made a big music video for RadioHead, we made a documentary for PBS about disabled dancers that got nominated for an Emmy Award. The business aspect of it was important to me as an aging dancer, I was like, ‘What am I going to do to make my livelihood when I’m no longer able to tour as a dancer?’ Honestly, that’s what I've been thinking about for the past 15 years, ‘How am I going to be able to keep making art sustainably?’”
“But it’s not like you just ‘discovered’ performance art,” I said. “Your initial success was found within the gallery scene. In some ways you are returning to your roots.”
“Totally,” she said. “It’s been a return to art after getting off the treadmill of touring with elite dance companies. For a long time I thought, ‘Nobody wants to see a forty-year-old woman performing.’ I left the stage for a while because of that, but now I think, ‘No, that’s ridiculous. We should be represented. People want to see people of all types perform!’”
“You’ve alluded to a general inaccessibility within dance a few times,” I said. “Recently, in a lot of creative mediums– modeling and fashion especially– there has been a strong movement to be inclusive to a wider range of bodies. Do you see that same trend in dance?”
“Definitely!” she said. “Modern dance has definitely been embracing that sort of inclusivity over the past few years. It’s so refreshing. Different bodies, ages, gender identities. Contemporary audiences don't want to walk into a theater and see a bunch of twenty-year-olds spinning and doing tricks. They want to see a depth of experience that bodies that have lived through different things can bring.”
“Do you think some of that comes from previously underground forms of dance like Vogue or rave culture becoming more glorified in the mainstream?” I asked.
“I definitely think that has something to do with it!” she said. “It’d be an interesting thing to research. A friend of mine is taking a class right now about how the underground club scene in New York City has influenced broader cultural trends in general.”
“Culture generally flows up within the arts,” I said. “The question is how do you get money in the right hands to keep it feeling genuine?”
“I think there’s a strange relationship to the underground and dance in the United States because of the funding structure and dance audience here,” she said. “If you go to the Joyce Theater or Lincoln Center you are going to be seated primarily with white haired people who live in Manhattan and are wealthy donors. In Europe the government subsidizes the ticket sales, so you also have throngs of 20 year olds drinking wine. Because of that, here a more traditional style is incentivized. Downtown is of course a different story, there you really can find more experimental and avant garde performance.”
Photo credit: Film Still of CEILING, cinematographer Larkin Donely, 2016
Recently, Kate has returned to her alma mater of NYU as professor.
“I never set out to become a full time professor,” she said. “I had my daughter in 2020, and at that point a lot of the artistic commissions I had got canceled [because of COVID]. I realized that I wanted to get my Masters Degree just to have the safety net of being able to get a job in academia. I got my Masters during lockdown studying under the great queer choreographer John Jasperse at Sarah Lawrence. I lost a lot of momentum in my own creative work, but I got a visiting professor position at NYU, which was great because that’s where I went to undergrad and I love NYU. I’m currently there full time, but they are testing me out long-term to see if I’ll become their version of a tenured professor. I love my students. I try to give them what my professors gave me; the real deal about what it means to be an artist. I try to treat them like collaborators when they walk into the studio.”
“NYU is such an ‘institution,’ and you’re such a wild child,” I said, laughing. “Do you have any issues fitting into this new more polished box?”
“Absolutely!” she said. “When I first got to NYU I had a lot of students follow me on social media. I was really proud of the work we were doing in class and I would share it sometimes. I had discussions with my Chair where they said, ‘We really encourage professors to maintain a strong boundary.’”
“Also, it must feel like you have to be more careful with the work you produce now that you have NYU behind you.” I said.
“In my normal social media presence before becoming a professor, I would comment politically or share nudity, now I just won't even touch it,” she conceded. “I feel like I’m a public figure in a way I didn’t before.”
Photo credit: Mark Escribano
“How did this most recent AI interactive piece come to fruition?” I asked.
“I was invited into a broader project called The Data Fluencies Theater Project that is funded by the Mellon Foundation,” she explained. “It’s multi-institutional. This professor at Emerson was working on it. She had assembled this team to look at ways that artists could ethically use AI systems within their work. I worked with this project for about 2 years, and within that context, I developed what I’m calling the Feminist Cyborg Interface. I’ve been working on what I’ve been calling ‘real time choreographic interfaces.’ We are using Touch Designer, which is a nodal program that runs on Python. It takes different code languages, media, and data from the human body to generate images. We merged that with an open source LOM AI technology [a model that generates images from text or image prompts] and got them talking to one another, so that we could stream real time generative AI. That took about a year and half to develop, working with this awesome creative technologist Mingyong Cheng. I kept playing around with the technology at home. I’ve installed it so that people who are non-dancers can interact with it. I’ve also used it as a performance tool. But this is the first time I’ve used it to build a solo.”
“As a writer, it feels kind of wild for a dancer to embrace AI,” I said. “I thought at least you guys were safe!”
“Nothing’s safe darling!” she said, laughing. “I think there are ways that artists can integrate these technologies in an impactful, empowering way, rather than a way that steals creativity and agency.”
“There were obviously a lot of themes present in this piece that are usually a part of dance and performance art conversations,” I said. “But, what specifically did the AI component add to this conversation that more traditional techniques couldn’t have?”
“Part of it is that we are in the Wild West with these technologies,” she began. “What we’ve built is kind of gimmicky. We are still kind of twirling it around like, ‘What does this do?’ The thing I was most interested in is the concept of AI bias. ‘AI is biased.’ It’s easy to say that, but it’s hard to really understand. AI bias, also known as machine learning bias or algorithm bias, is when AI systems produce biased results that reflect or perpetuate human biases. This can happen when the data used to train the AI system is biased, or when the AI algorithm itself is biased. The network we created can help show these biases in real time. When you see a human form in front of you that looks one way, then a prompt is put in, and what is put out looks totally different. For instance if you type in ‘beach babe,’ and there’s a black woman in front of the camera, the AI will spit out an image of a white woman with the same form every time. If you type in ‘world leader,’ it’s always a man. There is also something intriguing in terms of agency and control. When you are in there as a performer, you can oscillate between being male or female really quickly. Our identities can shift in this hyper-real space of the internet. We live these lives where sometimes we feel like our lives online are more real. There’s something there commenting on contemporary existence.”
“You used the word ‘gimmicky,’” I said. “I know what you mean, but at this point I’m a bit bored with subtlety. I want performance to thrill me.”
“I agree!” she said. “I want my audience to be engaged. To be titillated and entertained. I want them to have an experience.”