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This essay considers five instances of costumed political protest between 2008--19, by way of the Red Rebel Brigade, the Guy Fawkes mask, the Handmaid’s Tale costume, the pussyhat and the yellow jacket (gilet jaune). It explores the cultural resonances and significance of the costumes and accoutrements involved, and in particular how they draw upon a domain of fiction, symbolism and representation in order to perform resistance in the public sphere. It argues that a ‘chorus of the commons’, where costumed individuals operate as a group, presents both an aesthetic mode of political intervention and an oppositional theatre of the real.\ud \ud

The prefix ‘post’ by definition comes before something, in order to signal its afterwards. Discussions of (for example) postmodernism, posthumanism, the post-industrial, and indeed the post-digital have remarked that the ‘after’ or ‘beyond’ suggested in these framings is not necessarily categorical, nor even clearly demarcated by way of a date. In this case, the ‘post’ often contains significant features of what came before, and the presence of a name (the modern, the humanist) marks a continuity however much it is also always renounced. As Hal Foster suggested in 1983, addressing a trajectory from modernism to postmodernism, ‘modernism is now largely absorbed. Originally oppositional, ... today, however, it is the official culture’ (Foster 1985: ix). This raises a fundamental question concerning the ‘post’ as a cultural descriptor. To what extent does it mark a radical break, and to what extent is its precedent figured in the very shapes and expressions of the thing that it now describes? This tension is at the heart of cultural process, and thinking about the ‘post’ can help us understand principles of change within culture, society and politics, and therefore also within performance.

This essay explores duration as the notion of time passing there and then in the life of the performer/spectator. It reprises the Bergsonian account of duration (as less a measure of time, and more a function of the feeling of time passing) to suggest that Bergson’s work has a fresh charge. The construction of time in digital culture – to do with simultaneity and synthesis, where an accumulating past is held within a continually reforming present – provides points of connection with Bergson’s interest in experience as a succession of moments lived in the present. The essay takes a longer historical view, looking at accounts of renaissance painting, nineteenth-century melodrama and contemporary performance art, along with works and ideas by Abramović, Barthes, Beckett, and Cage, to examine relations between (hetero)chronology, duration, spectatorship and experience. It argues that in many instances duration in artworks is formed of proliferated moments, whose effects are to emphasize aspects of actuality by putting us in the face of the lived experience of action and consequence, and our own awareness of this (and our own) particular lived experience. Performance itself has a further charge, for its (re)presentations are encountered chronologically, precisely in and through a passage of time inhabited by both the work and the spectator/participant. The essay argues that duration is nonetheless always cultural; and is expressed and experienced in relation to a particular historical moment. The value of duration varies, whether it is a particular length of time, a passage for endurance, a field for ethical contention or a commoditized span of engagement. In a contemporary performance economy that privileges encounter and experience, duration provides the substrate for extensive and realisable kinds of living in the moment.\ud \ud