It’s 2023. Using only your smartphone you can study dance moves in Berlin, shout along with protests in Iran, watch opera in Finland or witness catastrophe in the Middle East, if not live then close to it. In other words, it’s easier than it’s ever been to believe you’re everywhere when you’re actually nowhere, to feel as if you’re acting when you’re only reacting, to think you’re making connections when you’re totally alone.

For RoseLee Goldberg, an art historian and the founding director of Performa, the New York-based nonprofit dedicated to performing artists, all this just proves how desperately we still need live performance. Performa is mounting its 10th Biennial edition this year, featuring nearly 50 artists and collectives from around the world, and includes events all across New York City through Nov. 19.

Goldberg herself doesn’t have a bad word to say about social media, though she doesn’t really use it. She keeps abreast of new developments in art the old fashioned way — through gallery and museum visits, frequent travel and word of mouth, and especially credits the tight cohort of curators at the core of Performa, most of whom have been with her from the beginning.

Every two years, she and they commission new works of dance, theater, or general happening, mostly from visual artists whose talent they admire but who’ve never worked live before. The idea started, years before Performa proper, with “Turbulent,” a simple but compelling two-channel video by the Iranian artist Shirin Neshat that Goldberg saw at the Venice Biennial in 1999. (In it, a man singing to an appreciative audience is faced down by a woman singing to an empty house.) Returning to New York, she suggested that Neshat find a way to stage it live — and they did, at Lincoln Center, in 2001.