Clara Garcia Fraile

Clara García Fraile, born in Spain in 1984, graduated in Dance and Visual Art at the University of Brighton (UK) in 2008. One year later, she founded the multimedia performance collective ‘Me and the Machine’ together with Sam Pearson.

Her work choreographs live encounters around, through and despite unusual applications of everyday audiovisual technologies, questioning emotions and power relations in the midst of our media-inundated lives, through our image-inundated bodies. Audiences are drawn into hybrid realms, somewhere between actual, virtual and poetic realities.

The results range from wearable dance film to expanded cinema screenings, one-to-one performances, immersive installations, a self-destroying book and an online platform for the anonymous exchange of secrets.

The ‘high production values and experimental and risk-taking approach’ of these works have resulted in several international awards, such as The Arches Brick Award 2010 and a nomination for the Total Theatre Awards. They have also been part of the British Council Edinburgh Showcase, and The Basement’s Supported Artists Programme and represented the UK in the Biennale of Young Artists from Europe and the Mediterranean.

Me and the Machine has worked at Forest Fringe (Edinburgh), La Casa Encendida (Madrid), Battersea Arts Centre (London), Spill and Sadler’s Wells (London), Cinedans (Amsterdam), Temps d’Image (Dusseldorf), Future Everything (Manchester), Strelka (Moscow), MUTEK (Montreal), Cairo, Macao, The National Review of Live Art (Glasgow), as well as in an old nuclear bunker in Kraków and an abandoned charcuterie in the westernmost part of Spain, amongst other places.