Make the Dream Real: World-Building Performance by El Vez, The Mexican Elvis

El Vez performances present a powerful message of social justice and inclusion in changing US and social contexts. Make the Dream Real interrogates how this message is activated through world-building: the use of a variety of theoretical, theatrical and musical tactics that bring into being a progressive social space that refutes the current economic, political, social and cultural configurations of the United States. World-building in an El Vez show 'makes the dream real' by imagining a society in which equal rights are guaranteed, inclusivity is fostered, difference is valued and the violence of economic inequality is mitigated. But, world-building through performance is not content to reside exclusively in the individual imagination or the social imaginary; it temporarily creates this new social space in actual time and space for the audience to experience. Using a dramaturgical methodology, which marries theoretical inquiry to theatrical practice based on dramaturgical thinking, critical proximity and intellectual flexibility, the book delves into the theoretical foundations that inform artist Robert Lopez's work, and each chapter analyses a different performative component he uses. Make the Dream Real interrogates how El Vez's playful engagements hold the United States to its egalitarian promises, voicing and enacting - however fleetingly - a just and richly inclusive social space through performance.

About the Author

Karen Jean Martinson, is an 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 explores the intersection of contemporary US-American performance, consumer culture, neoliberalism and the processes of identification, interrogating issues of race, class, gender and sexuality. In addition to writing about El Vez, the 'Mexican Elvis', she writes and talks (constantly) about dramaturgy and dramaturgical thinking.