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?

This dissertation examines aspects of artistic production and its relation to cultural policy by focusing on the dynamic performances and dispositions of artists and cultural bureaucrats as they communicate and demonstrate legitimacy through the process of advocacy. I argue for a concept of performative advocacy, a means to consider how, where, and when artists are displaying that legitimacy in relation to governmental agencies, professional and educational organizations, and the larger institution of arts funding and production in some parts of Canada.Using an institutional ethnographic approach, this study embraces the actions of individual artists and small collectives, particularly those considered in the "emerging" stage of their career, to consider how their actions are coordinated by these institutions and the texts they produce. From students in a suburban theatre training program, to a gathering of artists in Ottawa for Arts Day on the Hill, to program officers at the Canada Council itself, this research reflects on how these artists and arts bureaucrats negotiate their performances as advocates. Performative advocacy helps us to build a better art world through a more grounded understanding of what it is these individuals do as they relate to one another and the larger institution of arts funding supported by the government.By studying the presence of these actors, we can put cultural policy studies into conversation with our understanding of the work of arts practitioners while enhancing our understanding of the construction of the artistic identity. In this way, I offer a language of theatricality that aids in the understanding of what artists do, on a day-to-day basis, to advocate for their work, allowing policymakers, artists themselves, and the public to better listen and act in the interests of a robust art world. Gasoi -ii AcknowledgementsWhen I made the decision to attend university at 36 years old, my intent was to get my Bachelor's degree and get back to work as quickly as possible. Little did I know that I would absolutely fall in love with the ideas I began to explore, and more importantly, the people with whom I was exploring them. It is to all of them: colleagues, professors, students, and my eversupportive family, that I dedicate this work.Any dissertation is a collaborative effort, but an ethnography is uniquely indebted to the participants whose working lives are essential to the ideas shared in these pages. And so I thank

That performance can be captured and replayed may be a given, but much less well-understood is the relationship between that stored performance, the memory of a performed act, and the live event. The practice of intermedial theatre offers a unique way to probe that relationship, and the awareness of metatheatre further exposes the links between memory, technology, and performance. This paper argues that intermedial metatheatre, and my own work as a director, video-maker, and video performer for a 2014 production of Daniel MacIvor’s play Never Swim Alone, provides a valuable model for research-creation that can shed light on these questions in an embodied and experiential manner. Engaging with Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylisnka’s notion of performative media, as well as the concept of memory work from Annette Kuhn, I offer thoughts on materiality, time, and mediated memory, captured through technologies like camera and sound recording equipment, and in constructed spaces like studios and rehearsal rooms, represented by projection mapping software and digital projectors in the theatre space. All these are integrated into the network of actors and techniques that make up current practices in intermedial theatrical creation. Can this research begin to unravel ideas of authenticity and liveness when reactivating memories in relation to live actors, and before an audience? And what of our responsibility to the digital representation and the live performer when bringing these memories and moments together? How does the network of technologies and practitioners in intermedial theatre creation and presentation, understand and respect the “lifeness” of a mediated memory?

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