(15 min film, large file size, please allow up to 10 minutes for download)
The Secret Whispers of Each Other’s Watch
A collaboration for the Oxford Round Table
Session: The Two Cultures:
Balancing Choices and Effects Beit Room of Rhodes House
St. Anne’s College
Oxford, England
July 20 – July 25, 2008
Author: Professor Robert Tracy , University of Nevada, Las Vegas, USA Choreography: Professor Louis Kavouras , University of Nevada, Las Vegas, USA
Film: Matthew Novak and Cameron White , Las Vegas Filmmakers
Lighting: Professor Brackley Frayer , University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Session Abstract:
Las Vegas is a city known for easy pleasures and fast action. Part of the allure and mystique associated with Las Vegas as a post WWII city is this notion that it is positioned at the center of a great matrix which continuously picks up and disposes the latest trends and multiple trajectories of pop American culture, whether they be in the Arts or the Sciences. Professors Tracy and Kavouras have long recognized that Las Vegas has so matured as a value driver within the context of a tourist destination and as a place to live that it can credibly attract not just the world’s highest rollers, but also its most discriminating intellectuals, artists, and engineers/scientists. If you look beyond the cash syndactyl though, you will begin to recognize that Las Vegas’ studio programmatic---a dynamic and creative model of cross-cultural engagement combined with humanized science---has been developing a formidable art and science synthesis. Both Tracy and Kavouras enjoy collaborating within the shadows cast by Las Vegas’ studio culture.
The purpose of this proposed paper and performance then, will be the examination of art (Las Vegas), dance (through a simultaneous projection of a Louis Kavouras original choreography responding rhythmically to Tracy’s textural material) and science (entertainment engineering) as a unified “we-form” collaboration that posit the model of Castor and Pollux---the Greek mythological twins who possessed nonhierarchical attributes of mutual give-and-take
