Peter Fraser performs in improvisation, site-specific performance and dance. He has performed with De Quincey Co Bodyweather performance ensemble for over 20 years—in desert inhabitations, durational performance, outdoor and theatre-based works. He has worked with a wide range of groups and in self-devised solo and duo works. He has studied with dancers Ros Crisp, Min Tanaka and Deborah Hay whose solo, I think not, he has performed. Peter is a co-director of, and performs with, the Environmental Performance Authority ecological performance group. Recent projects include Sounds like movement, with instrument builder and musician Dale Gorfinkel, investigating the relationship of movement and materials, such as paper (‘Festival of Live Art’, Melbourne 2014); authentic movement/improvisation as part of a research group led by Shaun McLeod; the body/city project About Now for ‘Performing Mobilities’ (PSI Conference, Melbourne, 2015); eXchange—six short solos by six performers, presented at Taipei Art Festival; performing in Xavier Le Roy’s Temporary Title ‘exhibition’ (Carriageworks, 2015) and a Kathakali/Western performance investigation led by Arjun Raina. Peter recently completed a performance MA, Now and again: strategies for truthful performance, Monash, 2014.
Peter Fraser
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Gaps in the body: attention and improvisation
Fraser writes of having arrived at an understanding of improvisation that, rather than being about moving, is about ‘attention’. Instead of using an (imagined) objective view of a body to generate or create interesting or new movements, he employs a kind of noticing from the inside to move with his body, to cooperate with it as it fluctuates and changes. This noticing is full of ‘gaps’ and his attention is drawn to certain physical sites only to be lost as the noticing of a particular area swells, is dispersed or is replaced by a more immediate physical concern.