The Best Most Useless Dress: Selected Writings of Claudia La Rocco

by Claudia La Rocco, Elizabeth Robinson (Introduction), Paul Chan (Editor)

“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.

Genres: Poetry, Essays

148 pages, Kindle Edition

First published July 22, 2014

Reviews

[Phillip · Rating 5 out of 5]

a great book that blows open the boundaries of poetry, criticism and memoir. la rocco really changed my way of thinking about how these forms should behave and anyone interested in freeing their own ideas about these literary practices should read this book.

[Jacob Wren · Rating 5 out of 5]

A few lines from The Best Most Useless Dress:



"It is a desperate business, this business of having a self to hold and not hold onto."


"How long can a person recover before it becomes another form of not being?"


"My Colombian friend told us, it's like someone said to all the young people in the world, in order to make good work they have to erase themselves
He blames visual art."


"There is a way in which the translator must love failure."


"Akira Kasai told me hip hop was America's butoh."



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[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a weird and wonderful book (by a friend). Who else would've thought of a dance/theater-criticism-meets-poetry combination, and then made it work!?

[Leslie Roque · Rating 1 out of 5]

Dnf’ed sorry not sorry