Claudia La Rocco

Do you have a Valentine yet? How about a date with history, and a little vertigo?

"What I'd call 'advocating for stupid' just seems so standard now."  Send your review!

Under the Radar, Mark Russell’s international festival of contemporary theater, is now in its sixth year, and it’s bigger than ever: 20 shows over 12 days through January 17th, spread out at spaces around the city in addition to its home base, the Public Theater.

New York, NY —

The Public Theater's "Under the Radar" series returns with 20 shows over 12 days. Culture critic Claudia La Rocco talks with WNYC Weekend Edition Host about whether bigger is better when it comes to New York arts festivals.

Writing January wish lists is much more fun than trying to sum up the past decade. Here are 10 things that will never happen in 2010:

It's that time of year again: my top nine of 2009, in honor of the last of the single digit years that many of us will ever see. The good, the bad, the inane.

What are you doing on the 31^st? Something festive and special to mark the end of the beginning of the 21^st Century? (It can’t be too far now to 2012.)

New York, NY —

Romeo and Juliet -- The bard's most famous lovers have gotten treatments on stage, film, movies. But there’s more to be mined with the star crossed teenagers and a new production underway at The Kitchen is trying to do just that. The group Nature Theater ...

Nature Theater is known for working with everyday language, in all its stop-and-start glory. With their Romeo and Juliet, we're reminded that Shakespearean English, now so lofty, was ...

By the time you read this, I hopefully won’t still be suffering from the after-effects of P.S. 122’s holiday bash. Maybe I’ll even have regained my hearing.

It's Monday. It's cold. The annual tourist takeover of the city is inexorably ramping up, and you're too broke to buy [insert holiday of your choice] presents anyway. It is, in other words, time for a no-pressure to-do list!

That's right, folks: our December outing will also mark our one-year anniversary (nothing like the paper anniversary for an online club...).

P. Club organizer Claudia La Rocco reports back on two recent Performa events: a problematic panel discussion called "Writing Live" and Christian Tomaszewski and Joanna Malinowska's Soviet sci-fi fashion show.

It's possible for a ground-breaking artist to maintain their magic touch even after decades of work.  That's what Performance Club organizer Claudia La Rocco found with Richard Foreman's Idiot Savant.

A Romanian theater troupe that doesn't include a single Romanian. The Performance Clubbers went to see the show in a Grand Street loft, and were uniformly delighted.

Doris Humphrey’s 1959 book The Art of Making Dances is part of the bedrock of modern dance, a work that has functioned as a how-to guide for untold choreographers in the 50 years since it was published.

November is upon us, the weather is nicer than it was in July and the Performance Club has two events coming up. Mark your calendars and let me know if you're in or out.

If you're reading this, you're online, which means you're just a click away from the 53rd State -- the 53rd State Press, that is, a marvelous boutique press dedicated to publishing contemporary performance texts. Everyone with a stake in live art, from audience members to practitioners, should be heartened by this small but mighty endeavor.

On Saturday I boarded a bus in East Harlem for "The Provenance of Beauty," the Foundry Theatre's tour of the South Bronx. I have mixed feelings about this being the Performance Club's smallest outing ever (just two of us!): on one hand I would *really* like to hear other reactions. On the other, I'm happy none of you shelled out for what I found to be an irritating, offensive and thoroughly misguided work.

New York, NY —

What happens when a work of art that was once seen as avant-garde becomes a classic? And then a director or dance troupe wants to revive it. What kind of approach should they take? Cultural critic Claudia La Rocco has some Spring picks that bring ...