Profiling El Vez, The Mexican Elvis: A Dramaturgical Methodology to «Make the Dream Real»
Karen Jean Martinson
Karen.Jean.Martinson@asu.eduArizona State University (United States)
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8277-1615
Abstract
This article discusses the critical practice the author uses in her writing about El Vez, The Mexican Elvis. After offering a brief introduction to El Vez, to the artist Robert Lopez who created him, and to the relationship between them and the icon of Elvis, the author presents the aims of Make the Dream Real, the monograph she is drafting about El Vez/Lopez, to consider how it draws on biographical writing and yet departs from it. The author argues for a dramaturgical methodology and its inherent critical proximity as a means of writing an analytical, contextualized, engaging analysis of an artist and entertainer. The dramaturgical methodology, built on dramaturgical thinking, values flexibility, using a variety of research practices combined with vibrant autoethnographic writing to offer vivid analysis that conveys the intellectual, emotional, and somatic experience of attending a live El Vez performance. The article discusses the value of deep dramaturgical thinking and critical proximity that opens up primary sources and archives through an extended dialogue with the artist built on mutual trust and respect.
Keywords:
dramaturgical sensibility, dramaturgical methodology, critical proximity, El Vez, Mexican Elvis, Robert LopezReferences
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Authors
Karen Jean MartinsonKaren.Jean.Martinson@asu.edu
Arizona State University United States
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8277-1615
Karen Jean Martinson - Assistant Professor of Dramaturgy in the School of Music, Dance and Theatre in the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University. Her scholarly and creative work interrogates contemporary USAmerican performance, neoliberalism, and processes of identification, focusing on issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality. She is active in the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE), the American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR), the American Theatre and Drama Society (ATDS), and Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas (LMDA), which she serves as Vice President of Advocacy.
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