Spring 2000
Vol. 8, No. 2
Dance professor Louis Kavouras is on the move — literally. When UNLV's newest Renaissance man isn't choreographing, teaching, composing, painting, or performing, he's chairing his department and finding time to dance professionally in New York. It's just all in a day's creativity, he claims.
BY BARBARA CLOUD
atch Louis Kavouras' graceful moves, listen to his thoughtful commentary on aesthetics. You can tell right away — he was born to dance.
Yet, had he not decided to enroll in a certain elective in college, Kavouras might be building freeway bridges or programming computers today instead of serving as one of the premier exponents of modern dance in the United States.
As it is, he is the widely acclaimed principal soloist for the Erick Hawkins Dance Company in New York where he performs about one month each year. In 1997, New York critics named him "Best Soloist in New York" and one of the top 10 performers in the city. His dedication to modern dance extends beyond performing though; when he's not teaching dance to UNLV students or serving as chair of his department, he's choreographing his own pieces, designing sets for those pieces, or composing music for them.
And to think it all might have gone so differently but for one rather casual decision.
That decision was made in 1984 as Kavouras was leaning toward majoring in computer engineering at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.
"I noticed that I had an open elective in my schedule and saw modern dance on the list of courses," he recalls, adding that although he had been active in dance and theater in high school, he had never before studied that particular form of dance. "I knew a little about modern dance but not a lot. Ultimately, I found it to be, of all my classes, one of the most challenging."
Never one to avoid a challenge, Kavouras turned his full attention to a discipline that gave him a "context with which to view the world."
"I began to see that dance provided me with a place where I could completely lose myself and completely find myself, where I am constantly torn apart and reborn." Engineering didn't have much of a chance after that realization hit, he says.
Kavouras not only completed a bachelor's degree in theatre (dance was an emphasis within theatre) at Case Western in 1987, but he went on to earn a master of fine arts magna cum laude in dance there two years later.
"People thought it was such a radical shift from engineering to dance, but for me the two are similar," he says. "Engineering looks at systems and logic and makes sense of structure; the dancer looks at bodies and motion and makes sense of the human instrument."
In addition to all of his creative activities, Kavouras serves as chair of the dance department. Kavouras likens choreography to writing computer programs. "The way of thinking and structuring, looking at all the various elements, how the body is used, the logic of this phrase or that, and the sense of communicating an idea are similar," he says.
But, to Kavouras, the fact that movement is a "much more immediate, primal way of communicating" gives dance its special fascination.
"Dance brings us back to what's essential, to what it is to be human," he says. "For me that's the most powerful thing about art. It's an integrating force that brings us back."
He is quick to note, however, that the special fascination he finds in the art of dance was not shared by his parents at the time he chose it as a career. "My parents thought I was out of my mind," he says.
t's true that dance was probably not high on the list of career options Kavouras' father had in mind for his son; in fact, it was pretty clear to Louis early in life that baseball would have been his father's first choice. The elder Kavouras frequently took his son to baseball games at the spring training camps near their Florida home.
"He wanted me to have the same love of the game he had, and I did love it," he says. "But at the time, I just wanted to go to the beach."
As a boy, Kavouras explains, he had developed a particular fondness for the ocean, and he attributes his later absorption in modern dance in part to his appreciation of the sea's movement.
But, ironically, it was baseball, not the beach, that served as inspiration for his first choreographed work, which he created as a class project soon after he had turned to dance in college.
Interested in characterizing the movements of baseball players, Kavouras created The Baseball Dance, a piece originally choreographed simply as solos depicting the pitcher and the batter. The work became more complex over time as he introduced the rest of the team.
In addition to dealing with the growing complexity of the piece, he found himself juggling multiple roles in order bring an expanded version of it to the stage. Serving as both composer and set designer as well as choreographer, Kavouras not only had to determine the movement, but he also had to create appropriate music; the solos had been done in silence, but the larger work needed a musical context.
Working with an audio engineer, he sampled the sounds of a baseball game — the crowd, the crack of a bat, the ball hitting a glove — and scored them, adding a little Beethoven, The Blue Danube waltz, and organ music familiar to baseball fans everywhere.
Since that project, Kavouras frequently finds himself in the multiple roles of choreographer, set designer, and composer.
Kavouras says he wrote Baseball for himself, but it has been performed on many stages through the years before many audiences, even one in Russia; it has become part of the repertory of dance companies in several cities. In fact, he says one of the best performances of the piece was by a Cleveland dance company as part of the pre-game show at the opening of Jacob's Field in Cleveland in 1995.
fter graduating from Case Western, Kavouras continued on there as a dance lecturer for three years before joining the UNLV faculty in 1992. Through the years he has performed as a dancer in a number of productions, and, since writing The Baseball Dance, he has created more than 50 others pieces.
They have covered a variety of topics, some narrative and some abstract. He wrote a piece simply called Rain that attempted to capture his longing for a thunderstorm and the sense of relief that comes from a good, hard rain.
Most recently, he wrote a piece entitled Icarus, about the mythological character who flew too close to the sun, in an effort to portray the idea of "being close to the edge, of flying high, pushing the boundaries, yet needing to stay centered."
Representative of the modern dance style, all of his works are short pieces that are not constrained by the formal traditions of ballet.
"I want to create a kind of astonishment in my audience," he says.
Kavouras explains that modern dance is not the stuff of fluffy tutus and satin toe shoes. He notes that the legendary American dancer Martha Graham, whom he once met, is largely credited with breaking away from the formal structure demanded by traditional ballet to develop modern dance, which is generally characterized as more spontaneous, free-spirited, and highly personal. Other dancers, such as Merce Cunningham, further developed the form.
Kavouras found his expression in a style developed by another modern dance pioneer, Erick Hawkins, whose technique calls for free-flowing movement. The style influenced Kavouras' understanding of how the body should move in dance.
"In the Hawkins technique, we talk about integration," he says. "The body is naturally integrated. It is naturally held together. The weights of the body fall back into the center of the body."
Despite its focus on the natural movement of the body, it's a technique that takes years of training to master, he says.
Kavouras was first introduced to the Hawkins approach at Case Western. After coming to UNLV, he invited members of the Erick Hawkins Dance Company to conduct workshops in Las Vegas. At one of those workshops the Hawkins dancers identified Kavouras as one of their own and invited him to become a member of their New York company.
He was reluctant at first because of his UNLV responsibilities; in addition to teaching, he chairs the dance department. But he realized that he didn't want to miss the wonderful opportunity to work with a major New York company. Fortunately, he says, he was able to work out a schedule that has allowed him to meet his responsibilities to his students and to the department while pursuing the opportunity.
He has been a principal dancer and soloist with the company since 1996 and spends approximately one month in New York during the course of the company's season. Sometimes, when he is dancing a familiar role that requires little rehearsal, he flies across country just for a weekend's worth of performances.
"It's an incredible opportunity for me to be dancing in New York while I'm teaching students," he says. "I feel I am right in the middle of what dance is — in both the professional and academic worlds."
To say he has been well received on the dance scene is to put it mildly. In addition to the praise lavished on him by New York critics — who named him the "Best Soloist in New York" and one of the top 10 performers in New York — he has gained numerous accolades locally; he won UNLV's Charles Vanda Award for Excellence in the Arts last year.
o Kavouras, the drive and passion that have helped him reach new heights in creative expression are critical to his success.
"I tell all my students that anyone with drive finds a place for themselves. There's always room for talent, always room for drive, no matter what the field," he says.
But for Kavouras, the drive must be directed toward the aesthetic.
"We're here to train artists. It's not about putting your leg here or there, or doing so many turns. That's craft, and, yes, that's part of it; we're going to work on that, drive our students crazy with it. But the other part is teaching our students what it is to be artists."Artists change things. I hope my students go out there and take dance where it needs to go. Change it. Move it around. Make it new. Make us look at it in a whole other way."
"Dance brings us back to what's essential,