Director Sees Potential in Wide Range of Cambodian Art

Suon Bunrith, country director for Amrita Performing Arts, visits VOA Khmer. He is in his second year of a three-summer fellowship at the John F. Kennedy for the Performing Arts in Washington.

Wednesday, 03 August 2011
Nuch Sarita, VOA Khmer | Washington

“We perform onstage to show the real stories of people who survived the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia [...]. We do not want to see these stories continue to evolve today, and you are invited to imagine the future of the people in these stories.”

Suon Bunrith is the country director for Amrita Performing Arts and is now in his second year of a three-summer fellowship at the John F. Kennedy for the Performing Arts in Washington.

The program gives attendees from 24 countries skills that help them improve the development of the arts at home, he told “Hello VOA” recently.

Funded by major US donors and local businesses, Amrita was established in 2003 as an independent production company, which collaborates with the government and independent artists in the research and performance of traditional Cambodian performances.

In ‘Khmeropedies,’ an Exercise of Cambodian Dance Style

Choreographer Emmanuelle Phuong, dancers Chey Cankethea and Phon Sopheap, at the rehearsals of Khmeropédies II. (Photo: Courtesy of Amrita Performing Arts)

Nuch Sarita, VOA Khmer
Washington, DC Wednesday, 09 June 2010

"The main purpose of Khmeropedies is to share my experience as a dancer in the West, a very different technique with Cambodian classical dancers, and see if they can live together."

Amrita Performing Arts is scheduled to perform at the Howard Gilman Performance Space Baryshnikov Arts Center in New York City later this month, as it bring a new contemporary dance method to the US.

Amrita performers will first bring Khmeropedies One and Two to the Festival of Arts and Ideas in New Haven Connecticut from June 16 to June 19, followed by four performances at the Baryshnikov Arts Center in New York from June 24 to June 26.

The performers in Khmeropedies are trained in Khmer classical dance and represent the next generation of Cambodian creativity. Contemporary Khmer dance is a brand new discipline that had to look abroad for its initial performance. Khmeropedies I was performed in New York in April 2007 at the Baryshnikov Art Center.

Emmanuele Phuon, the main choreographer, is a French-Cambodian who lives in Brussels. She started training with the Royal Ballet of Cambodia at age 5. In 1975 she moved to Bangkok with her mother and then to Avignon, France. She studied and graduated from the Conservatoire National de Dance in 1986. In 1987, Phuon went to New York and has performed with the Elisa Monte Dance Company and the Baryshnikov White Oak Dance Project.

“The main purpose of Khmeropedies is to share my experience as a dancer in the West, a very different technique with Cambodian classical dancers, and see if they can live together,” she told VOA Khmer.

“Khmeropedies is a play between the words Khmer and Gymnopedies, a reference to a French composer and pianist in 1887, and could mean an exercise in Khmer style,” she said.

Phuon said the basic idea for the work was to take Khmer classical dance and apply it in different ways and to different themes and to push it as far as possible from its original form while keeping it recognizable.

Chey Chankethya, one of Cambodia’s best classical dancers, said Cambodia artists need to take part in festivals and other environments to develop their art.

“To me the Khmeropedies, a contemporary piece of work, is not just only about showing movement or beauty of the dance, but it reveals a new Cambodian thought,” she said. “The dance piece is able to tell the audience exactly how the traditional Cambodian dance transforms over time and how one culture acts together with others.”

Part Two of Khmeropedies is about the dialogue between an older star dancer and teacher, Sam Sathya, who is rooted in traditions, and her three young students, who are curious and want to experiment with other techniques.

The four performers in Khmeropedies are Sam Sathya, Chumvan Sodhachivy, Chey Chankethya and Phon Sopheab.

Chumvan Sodhachivy, a solo star in Khmeropedies I, began training in Cambodian classical dance in 1994. She was trained specifically in Neay Rong, the male role, folk dance and Sbek Thom, large shadow puppetry. She participated in many dance festivals and has participated in numerous workshops with international artists from India, Indonesia, the US and the World Dance Alliance.

“I think it is a great opportunity to bring the new face of Cambodian dance to US audiences who mostly have only experienced Cambodian classical dance,” she said. “It is important to share with the rest of the world the cultural transformation taking place in Cambodia.”

"Sovannahong" Marks Classic Dance Revival

Princess Norodom Bopha Devi

By Nuch Sarita, VOA Khmer
Original report from Washington
04 July 2008

"Sovannahong," the premier of a newly revived work of Cambodian classical dance, will be performed by artists of the Secondary School of Fine Arts on Friday at Chaktomuk Conference Hall.

The show was choreographed by Princess Norodom Bopha Devi and an elderly master of arts team, which is coming back to the stage after half a century.

"The Rockefeller/ACC Mentorship Program had provided funds through Amrita to work with Royal University of Fine Arts, a project that focuses on research, documentation and the transfer of knowledge and experience from elder artists to younger teachers," said Suon Bun Rith, Cultural Coordinator of Amrita Performing Arts.

Proeung Chheang, vice rector of Royal University of Fine Arts in Phnom Penh and Dean of Choreographic Arts, said that this was the first time they had performed the whole story of "Sovannahong" in dance dramas.

"Four types of roles exist in the 'Sovannahong's' story: Neay Rong (men), Neang (maidens), Yeak (ogres), and the Sva (monkeys)," Proeung Chheang said.

Soth Somaly, a dance teacher at the University of Fine Arts, is from an artist family; her grandmother and her mother were dancers. Born in 1962, she began to learn dancing at age five. She has managed artists performing in Europe, Asia and the United States and is a playwright of dance drama. She wrote the lyrics of each song in the play.

Princess Bopha Devi was a major member of the Royal Ballet. She was part of a mere handful of teachers who survived after the war to help rebuild the Royal Cambodian Ballet. In the 1960s Princess Bopha Devi was also part of the court dance troupe. She became the prima bellerina. One of her well known roles was performing as Apsara Mera in the Apsara dance.

"My grandmother, former Queen Sisowath Kassamak Neary Rath, made [dance] an important part of the royal Khmer court. Court dance was revived again and was at its peak under the reign of my father, Norodom Sihanouk," Princess Bopha Devi told VOA Khmer.

In the 1970s with the overthrow of the royal monarchy, Khmer court dance began to decline. The worst was to come during the Khmer communist revolution.

"The elder teacher and I tried to find what documents were available to keep the art form alive and revived the great loss with about a third of the dance repertoires, the steps, gestures, movements, narratives, survived intact," she said.

The music used for Khmer classical dance is played by a pinpeat orchestra. While the pinpeat orchestra is not playing, a chorus of several singers will sing out the lyrics, here written by Soth Somaly, which describe the story of the Sovannahong's dance.

Khmer classical dance uses a particular piece of music for a certain event, such as when a dancer enters a scene, performing certain actions, such as flying, or walking, and when leaving the stage.

Cambodia's literary epic comes to the London stage

14 March 2007

Demons fight simians in 'Weyreap's Battle' at the Barbican, but the real crusade was rebuilding the country's theatrical tradition after its near-annihilation by the Khmer Rouge

By Robert Turnbull
The Independent (UK)

During the Sixties, Jackie Kennedy, Marshal Josef Tito and Charles De Gaulle were among the rich and famous who travelled to the newly independent Cambodia to enjoy its resplendent dance culture. In those halcyon days under the country's formidable monarch King Norodom Sihanouk, performing artists were respected members of a vibrant and developing society.

The Khmer Rouge put an end to that. Faced with Pol Pot's infamous dictum "to keep you is no gain, to kill you no loss", dancers associated with the royal regime lived under constant threat of execution, often administered arbitrarily and with perfunctory violence. About 80 per cent of performing artists perished during the terror of 1975 to 1979.

From 1980, war-weary dancers, musicians and shadow puppeteers returned to Phnom Penh to begin the painstaking process of documenting centuries-old techniques preserved only in fragile memories. There was no money - artists were paid with petrol and rice - but within only a few years, complex dance-dramas made up of thousands of gestures had been rescued from oblivion. Tradition had proved its ability to resist the worst of mankind's brutality.

Britain has a rare chance to enjoy the fruits of more than 20 years of rebuilding Cambodia's dance repertory next week when an amalgam of Phnom Penh's Royal University of Fine Arts (Rufa), Cambodia's National Theatre and Amrita Performing Arts brings Weyreap's Battle to the Barbican Theatre, as part of its annual Bite festival. The new production represents the first full-length dance-drama of its type to have emerged from Cambodia for half a century.

The genre is "lakhaon kaol", a dance-drama performed by men and based on tales from the Ramayana. This great Hindu literary epic, in which gods and monkeys battle demons and ogres, and show supernatural powers as they triumph over evil, is so ingrained in the national consciousness as to remain a principal source of inspiration for Cambodia's artists.In a culture dependent on oral transmission, there's some debate around the origins of lakhaon kaol. A 10th-century Angkorian inscription describes a masked dance, but the Cambodian musicologist Pich Tum Kravel believes that the form first emerged in the 13th century.

Lakhaon kaol sections of the Reamker - the Cambodian version of the Ramayana - last eight or more hours. The action-packed 90-minute segment to be seen at the Barbican relates how the monkey king Hanuman and his forces rescue King Rama (Preah Ream) from the clutches of Weyreap, the brother of the evil tyrant Ravana (Krong Reap), who intends to drown him.

In the early 1970s, Amrita's Pum Bun Chanrath, the co-choreographer of Weyreap's Battle, enjoyed a comfortable living performing and teaching the role of Hanuman at Phnom Penh's Royal Palace. As was the case with millions of his compatriots, his life changed abruptly on 17 April 1975. Marched off into the countryside, he spent his years under the Khmer Rouge years farming vegetables, terrified of exposure as a classical dancer. When, finally, Chanrath "confessed" to being a monkey dancer, he was ordered to perform and he fully expected it to seal his fate. In fact, it saved his life. Chanrath's interrogator so enjoyed his simian antics dressed in nothing but an old cotton rice sack that he demanded repeat performances. "Hey, you, Hanuman, you will stay alive to dance for me," he screamed. For Chanrath, it was humiliating. "I was so sick with malnutrition, I kept stumbling," he says.

Finally returning to Phnom Penh in the mid-1980s, Chanrath, joined by Weyreap's Battle's co-choreographer Pok Sarann, worked tirelessly to rejuvenate the kaol style. At Phnom Penh's revived Rufa and the Department of Performing Arts of the Ministry of Culture, rehearsals were rigorous and characterised by a rare camaraderie, but in impoverished and battle-scarred Cambodia there were neither the funds for performances nor the political will to invest significantly in their endeavour.

A US embassy grant of $15,000 in 2003 was a dream come true. In Weyreap's Battle, Chanrath and Sarann were finally able to realise a new repertory piece that would respect the traditional kaol rules but have the integrity of its own sets and costumes. "In the past, we had a single bed and two bamboo frames as sets, and for lighting, only the moon," says Chanrath. "Now we can construct a real set and, with the help of lighting techniques, give our production a modern feel."

Weyreap's Battle has caused a sensation in Bangkok and Melbourne. Amrita's Fred Frumberg says: "Showcasing Cambodia's intangible heritage can only result in greater global appreciation of its importance as a source of invaluable world heritage."

So has Pol Pot's legacy been finally laid to rest? High-ranking Cambodians pay lip service to the idea of the traditional arts being "the soul of the nation", says Frumberg, but artists continue to face an enervating daily struggle against official neglect and organic corruption. "Cambodia's economy may be rapidly growing but while only 0.25 per cent of the country's national budget is spent on culture, artists will forever remain among the poorest of Cambodia's civil servants," he says.

In the absence of government investment, Amrita and other producing organisations engender the kind of nurturing environment that encourages creativity. "If artists and their admirers remain upbeat, it is largely because of increasing worldwide demand for their work," says Frumberg. "Cambodia's performing artists deserve to be honoured as the guardians of long-standing traditions that define its culture and underpin a civilisation that the Khmer Rouge brought so close to annihilation."

'Weyreap's Battle', Barbican, London EC1 (020-7638 8891), 30 March to 1 April