The mediated arena: Re-image-ining the epideictic in the digital age

Abstract

Abstract Colin Kaepernick takes a knee during the singing of the national anthem at an NFL game, and the digital midwife helps birth a movement. Mike Pence is called out from the stage at a performance of the smash-hit musical, Hamilton, and the President of the United States takes to Twitter in rebuttal. New York’s Public Theater and its acclaimed artistic director, Oskar Eustis, stage a thinly veiled parable of the Trump presidency in their Shakespeare-in-the-Park production of Julius Caesar. Images of the performance are alternatively venerated and eviscerated on social media, frightened sponsors pull out and audiences attack the stage. Welcome to the new arena, where the theatre and the stadium have once more taken their places as flashpoints for political protest, and where digital media are not mere witnesses, but powerful participants. This article deploys these examples to ‘re-image-ine’ classical notions of the epideictic as rhetorical display. Engaging with William Beale’s 1978 rhetorical performative update to this classification, along with theorizations of performance and technical images, I argue the epideictic has the unique ability to reflect the values of the community in the moment, activating audiences and speakers in new ways. Modern audiences, informed by digital technologies and evolving relationships to the live event, have entered new areas of interaction and performance that invite new scholarship and explication. How can epideictic performance, (conceived as display and ceremony, but also as live in ways that deliberative and forensic rhetoric are not) act as a useful theory for understanding digital realities and moments of disruption and resistance?