The Performance Club was a curated, multi-feature blog offering a forum for Claudia La Rocco’s arts writing as well as a chance for all interested parties to share their own critical voices in an interactive community focused on live contemporary art. When originally created for WNYC’s website in 2008 while she served as New York Public Radio’s cultural critic, The Performance Club addressed the decline of journalistic space for thoughtful consideration of art, the absence of lively public debate, and the isolation of critics and artists in an era of specialization and academicism. In its new iteration, the blog served as an informational hub, using the unique capabilities of the web to give people outside New York access to one of the most vibrant arts centers in the world.
The Performance Club was originally a social and online group dedicated to the arts of democratic criticism, conversation, and exchange surrounding live art, which was created by La Rocco at WNYC as a cultural critic from 2008-2010. La Rocco relaunched The Performanmce Club independently in 2011 with support of an Arts Writers Grant, and ran it as a home for experimental arts writing operating within a constellation of artists, writers, and audience members.
Claudia La Rocco is a poet and critic. She writes about performance for the New York Times, is on the faculty of the graduate program in Art Criticism & Writing at the School of Visual Arts, and has taught and lectured at a variety of universities, festivals, and institutes. She is an editor-at-large at the Brooklyn Rail, a founding editor of Hyperallergic Weekend, a contributing editor at Emergency INDEX and a member of the Off The Park poetry press. For the past three years, she has been a teaching artist-in-residence at Arizona State University. From 2007 to 2010, she was cultural critic for WNYC New York Public Radio, where she created The Performance Club. La Rocco was a writer and editor at the Associated Press from 2001 to 2008. She holds a degree in English from Bowdoin College and lives in Brooklyn.