As we near the end of our Summer Reading series, we bring you Claudia La Rocco’s meditations on the American Realness Festival. The author asks, “Playing to the intelligentsia for cheap laughs while the world burns: Does anybody still need to own this in 2015?” This article was originally published in Artforum on January 29, 2015.

Miguel Gutierrez. Age & Beauty Part 2, 2015; performance view, January 14, 2015, Abrons Arts Center, New York. Photo: Ian Douglas.

I’ve just deleted the three hundred words I’d written to start this month’s column, which covers a fraction of the myriad festivals, showings, showcases, etc., mushrooming up around the annual Association of Performing Arts Presenters conference in New York.

There wasn’t anything particularly wrong with these words, which talked about the “show-must-go-on New York performance crisis” and how exhausted and overwhelmed everyone is by the whole magnificently underfunded circus. The system is distressingly fucked, has been for years.

It’s just that, well, I wrote about these same exact things in 2012, and then again last year. And while the “system” in which individual artists and tiny, overburdened arts organizations subsidize much of the glittery, crummy situation remains just as gross (indeed, artist fatigue/budget malaise was a theme this year, courtesy of artists like Cynthia Hopkins, Miguel Gutierrez, and Jack Ferver), for 2015 I want to talk about something else.

I want to talk about how generally lucky I felt—despite suffering through a few outright stinkers and while disagreeing with some of the politics on display—to be able to take all of this in during my personal audience odyssey. Twenty-two shows in twelve days, and almost all of them strong in parts or whole: Against all odds, or maybe in some unsavory yet exciting ways related to those odds, there is a wealth of vital, progressive, deeply valuable performance being made in America.

Read the full article here.