Choreographer Accepts $25,000 Art Award [-Congratulations, Mrs. Sophiline Cheam Shapiro!]

Sophiline Cheam Shapiro (R) teaching a dancer

By Im Sothearith, VOA Khmer
Original report from Washington
30 September 2009

Khmer choreographer Sophiline Cheam Shapiro was given an award by the National Endowment for the Arts, after co-founding the Khmer Arts Academy in California.

The National Heritage Fellowship is the highest form of federal recognition for folk and traditional arts. Shapiro and 10 others were awarded this year.

“The reason why I think her award today is so important is that it gives her the ability to continue the art,” Laura Richardson, a Democratic congresswoman from California who joined the Sept. 22 ceremony, told VOA Khmer.

“Art is so powerful because art doesn’t judge men, women, boys, and girls,” she said. “It’s preserving our cultures. By being able to show the art, it teaches young people to respect their elders. It teaches young people something special that they have and that no one has. So, I am hoping by her continuing to teach the art, we can help more kids in learning, rather than being out in the streets doing something negative, and she has been doing it for a long time and we value her and love her in our community.”

Shapiro said she felt honored to be given the award, which includes a grant of $25,000.

“It is important that I use this fellowship to support and continue to teach art at our Khmer Art Academy,” she said.

Shapiro began training in Khmer art form in 1981. Two years after moving to Long Beach in 2002, she co-founded Khmer Arts Academy in the hopes of preventing the loss of the art form in the aftermath of the Khmer Rouge.

Barry Bergey, the NEA’s director for Folk and Traditional Arts, told VOA Khmer that in any year, the endowment gets 250 or so nominations. Only 10 or 11 are selected.

“Sophiline, of course, was recognized not only for her artistic skills and choreography, but for the fact that she teaches and makes such a commitment to the art form, and the panel recognized that,” Bergey said. “There’s no requirement in any way in terms of using the money, but we know these artists are committed to their traditions [and] that they are most likely to carry on what they are doing.

“That is what we want them to do, to continue just what they do, make art, teach about the art form and interact with the public,” he said. “Sophiline has done that both in the United States and in Cambodia, and that makes her special.

Long Beach's Sophiline Cheam Shapiro a National Endowment for the Arts honoree

05/18/2009
By Greg Mellen, Staff Writer
Long Beach Press Telegram (California, USA)

LONG BEACH - Sophiline Cheam Shapiro only spends part of her time in the United States and Long Beach these days, but she still carries clout.

The artistic director for the Khmer Arts Academy has been selected by the National Endowment of the Arts as one of 11 artists honored as a 2009 National Heritage Fellow.

The $25,000 award recognizes artistic excellence and support and contributions to folk and ethnic arts.

Previous Heritage Fellows include bluesman B.B. King, Cajun fiddler and composer Michael Doucet, cowboy poet Wally McRae, gospel and soul singer Mavis Staples, and bluegrass musician Bill Monroe.

Prumsodun Ok, a dance instructor at the Khmer Arts Academy in Long Beach and the curator of its salon series of Asian performing arts, was thrilled to see his mentor honored.

To Ok, it is the tutelage of Shapiro and her willingness to use Khmer dance as a vehicle to other forms that sets her apart.

"She has been so pivotal in my growth," said Ok, who studied dance in Cambodia under her. "She opened her home to me in much the way my mother opened her home to me. (Shapiro) opened her arts to me."

Considering that classical Khmer dance was nearly lost in the Cambodian holocaust, it makes Shapiro's support of the form and its rebirth all the more important to artists like Ok.

"To see her being recognized for her work, the way it has developed and to see the way she has been able to show why it should be preserved, valued and sustained," Ok said, was exciting. "I am very proud to be part of her artistic lineage."

Ok is extending her work with the ongoing salon series that has made a variety of Southern and Southeast Asian performing arts available to the public.

Craig Watson, executive director of the Arts Council for Long Beach which provides grants to the Khmer Arts Academy in Long Beach, was thrilled to see a local honored.

"It's quite an elite honor," said Watson, who said the award reminds him that his organization needs to keep looking to promote ethnic art.

"The native and folk arts are at the depth of of our culture," he said. "If we live in the most diverse community in the country then our support should be the most diverse in the country."

A survivor of the Cambodian genocide, Shapiro was among the first generation of dancers in the wake of the Khmer Rouge regime to attend the Royal University of Fine Arts in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

She was also a member of the school's classical dance faculty and performed internationally.

She emigrated to the United States in 1991 and taught classical dance in the Southland before co-founding the Khmer Arts Academy in Long Beach in 2002.

Shapiro has shifted much of her energy and focus back to Cambodia, where she established the Khmer Arts Theater in Takmao province, about 15 kilometers south of Phnom Penh.

There, at a lavish theater called the Center for Culture and Vipassana, she directs and choreographs for a professional troupe of dancers who are graduates of the Royal University.

It's a big shift for a woman who, less than six years ago, was teaching inner-city youth in Long Beach in a cramped space at the United Cambodian Community building as well as conducting sessions in her living room.

Shapiro has received international acclaim for her work. Pamina Devi, Shapiro's Cambodian interpretation of Mozart's Magic Flute premiered in Vienna in August 2006 at the Schonbrunn Palace Theatre.

greg.mellen@presstelegram.com, 562-499-1291