Phoenix Risen

October 15, 2007
by Joan Acocella
The New Yorker (USA)

Who knew that Cambodian classical dance had anything in common with “The Magic Flute”? Peter Sellars. He commissioned Sophiline Cheam Shapiro, the director of the Khmer Arts Academy, to create a new version of the opera in honor of Mozart’s two-hundred-and-fiftieth birthday, last year. The resulting piece, “Pamina Devi,” which will open at the Joyce on Oct. 9, has a new score, for a pinpeat ensemble (drums, gongs, etc.), and it is a Cambodian dance-drama. This means that the twenty-two dancers wear costumes that belong in a museum and move very slowly, flexing their lovely fingers like spider chrysanthemums. But the dramatis personae are much the same as Mozart’s, and the spirit is similar: sweet and hopeful. At the end, Shapiro’s heroine refuses to choose between the Queen of the Night and Sarastro. Instead, she sets off into the unknown, to create a just society. This is clearly a prayer for Cambodia, where, during Pol Pot’s regime, an estimated eighty per cent of artists died. Shapiro’s company rose from those ashes.