The Best Most Useless Dress

“Inquiry and seduction stroll hand in hand through these pages.  Insubordinate, sexy, ravenously curious.”  — Elizabeth Robinson, from the introduction


“Claudia La Rocco’s impactful writing sketches its performing subjects in real time, depicting not only the character of work, but the conditions in which it collectively forms and exists. Here the spaces of New York performance and the spaces of critical writing reveal themselves anew. She conjures the voices we want and need: critical and committed, self-reflexive, and brazenly addressing the interior and exterior states that define live art experiences.” — Jay Sanders, curator of performing arts, Whitney Museum of American Art


Widely known as an incisive critic for the New York Times and Artforum, Claudia La Rocco is also a poet and performer whose hybrid texts are as mercurial and imaginative as her criticism. The Best Most Useless Dress reveals the breadth and depth of La Rocco's work, encompassing a decade's worth of poetry, essays, performance texts and reviews. Trespassing genre boundaries, these writings explore how movement and rhythm—in time, through space, across bodies, on the page —engender experience itself. With an introduction by poet Elizabeth Robinson. This e-book contains enhanced multimedia content created by La Rocco herself.