All of This Restraint in the Service of Beauty

Royal Ballet of Cambodia at Brooklyn Academy of Music

By ALASTAIR MACAULAY

NYT - Published: May 3, 2013

 

Andrea Mohin/The New York Times

Royal Ballet of Cambodia Chap Chamroeun Tola performing at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Flourishing their hands like fans, the dancers of the Royal Ballet of Cambodia create a measured world of complete etiquette. Everything is recollected in tranquillity. Even a battle is depicted with patterned composure. Nothing is fast. Yet stasis seldom occurs; some flow of movement is almost always in evidence. The planting of the heel or the ball of a bare foot; the flexing of a foot raised behind; the soft, S-bend adjustment of the torso at hip and shoulder in certain prolonged balances: these are all sensuous ingredients of the style.

The company — 21 female and 3 male dancers, 4 singers and 5 instrumentalists — is performing at the Brooklyn Academy of Music through Saturday; its production, “The Legend of Apsara Mera,” choreographed by Princess Norodom Buppha Devi, is a two-part narrative lasting some 80 minutes. This isn’t ballet in the modern Western sense of straightened legs and pointed feet, let alone pirouettes, jumps or acrobatic display.

‘Several of the positions and steps correspond to what we see in some forms of Indian dance; they presumably derive from the Natya Shastra, the old text of South Asian dance style. But no form of Indian dance has the courtly quality we see here. In my experience, only Javanese Bedhaya — another court form — has the same expressive contrast between intense subject matter and formal containment.’

 

HRH Princess Bopha Devi encapsulates the quintessence of classical Khmer beauty and, in her heyday, the Queen of her art - School of Vice [image: google]

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‘Great armies may march across lands and nations, but only love, truth and beauty can conquer hearts’

But is there a dance style anywhere today that more truly deserves the adjective “classical”? Some Western observers will surely feel that drama has been eliminated here in the pursuit of soft-spoken and ordered beauty, but the ceremonious nature of the action maintains, like a gossamer web, a constant tension. Individual characters are backed by symmetrical retinues; the perfect geometries of the final wedding dance gorgeously fill the stage.

It’s remarkably like the world of the Baroque courts, where ballet came into its own — much more so than most Western ballet seen now. It reminds us that Louis XIV’s Versailles was called “a perpetual ballet,” where etiquette was the choreography.

Also like Baroque dance is the marvelously fluent control of the supporting knee, the subtle use of the various components of the foot, the expressive angling of the head, and the decorum of the arms. The fingers are often separated and splayed in extraordinarily hyperextended positions; the hands, making one declaration after another (often with startling asymmetry), are seldom raised above the level of the forehead. The elbow is often outstretched while the forearm moves in and out, the palms are presented in newly dramatic ways, and wrists are circled, angled, extended. Meanwhile the line of the neck and shoulder stays always serene.

The dancers, though barefoot, wear golden attire: armlets, bracelets, anklets and — above all — headdresses. (Several crowns look like Asian temples.) Women wear calf-length pleated skirts as in some Indian dance genres; dancers representing demons, giants and monkeys wear masks. Neither love nor warfare disturbs the impassivity of the faces.

As extraordinary as the amazing hands, but far more gently mysterious, are the rhythm, dynamics and musicality. The music is mostly based in the sweetly percussive tintinnabulations of the gamelan, though it’s often accompanied by either a sralai, a woodwind instrument that’s oboelike in sound, or vocal chanting. The dancing, however, generally rides over the individual beats in an endlessly calm legato.

Where another genre would hear a 4/4 tempo as the cue for 16 successive movements, this one is more likely to use it for a spiraling undulation through the body. Occasionally the opening of a hand or the planting of a heel perfectly illumines a chime or a drumbeat. Far more frequently, though, the dancing flows over, rather than with, the music’s beat: it’s a boat sailing steadily over the steady brisk pulse of engines or oars that propel it.

The occasional vocalism also uses this kind of legato, but the soft current of the dancing has a particular hush. There’s plenty of footwork, all deliberate and small-scale; often a leg is raised and angled at thigh-height, but it’s not easy to feel a rhythmic connection between the music and these moves.

Western ballet began as large-scale public display by the court, but Cambodian ballet began as private palace entertainment. The Khmer Rouge suppressed it. The present company is led and choreographed by Princess Norodom Buppha Devi, a daughter of King Norodom Sihanouk (who died last October) and sister of the present king, Norodom Sihamoni; she first performed in public when she was 8, in 1951, and has been in charge of this company since the 1980s.

For Cambodian ballet, the biggest change is that an in-palace entertainment has become a form of public display. How much, a Western observer may wonder, have other aspects changed? Several male roles are played by women: is that an old tradition or a new departure?

Certainly it’s impressive that, despite the fraught political history of Cambodia in the late 20th century, this company still tells highly charged stories (gods versus giants; the marriage of a goddess and a prince) in terms of religious worship, utmost politeness and order. “The Legend of Apsara Mera” is a story where divinity meets nationalism. The first half is about gods battling giants; in the second half, when the goddess Apsara Mera meets the Indian prince, it is implicit that their union produces the realm of Cambodia.

The stage we observe has a shrine on our left, where characters sometimes make offerings to gods. On our right are the singers and musicians, seated on the floor. A low dais occupies a central part of the rear stage: it is usually occupied only by leading characters: gods, demons, royalty. Several of the positions and steps correspond to what we see in some forms of Indian dance; they presumably derive from the Natya Shastra, the old text of South Asian dance style. But no form of Indian dance has the courtly quality we see here. In my experience, only Javanese Bedhaya — another court form — has the same expressive contrast between intense subject matter and formal containment.

The formality is such that dancers seldom touch one another. While depicting combat, one dancer stands in a balance on another’s thigh, but only once. At the end, when the theme is successful courtship and marital union, the dancers are courteously conjoined; the male characters place hands gallantly on the female partners’ hips and hands.

Love, however, is shown without the meeting of pelvises or the friction of torsos. Apsara Mera makes no flamboyant acceptance of Prince Kambu’s courtship. The demure ripplings of her head and torso, staying close to his protective stance, as if safe in harbor, tell us of her joy.