"Cambodian Masters: Stories Told" - By Stéphane Janin

My sincere thanks to Stephane Janin and The Cambodian Buddhist Society, Inc. for bringing these stories. They allow me to learn about our wonderful and talented Compatriots and they also bring back a flood of memory from another time and another place (that of the refugee camps in Thailand) - THANK YOU! Socheata

Orginally posted by Stéphane Janin
at http://stephanejanin.com/2010/05/06/a-cambodian-journey-in-america/

From the Cambodian refugee camps of the Thai border in 1979 to America today, there’s still thousands of stories that must be told.

The confirmed artists that I have met at the Cambodian temple of Silver Spring, Maryland these last two years have a compelling story… Most of them have fled Cambodia while the Vietnamese took over the country and the Khmer Rouge loosing it. Several ended up meeting together in Kao-I-Dang refugee camp where they were eager to bring back the Cambodian living arts alive. After a few months, a group of 30 families of artists was admitted in the United States, among the first Cambodian refugees accepted in the US. They settled in Maryland and started a new life in the early 80s. For the last 30 years now they have challenged the odds, going back to school, looking for jobs to support their family and raising their children. Still they continued practicing their art, sharing the tradition to a younger generation of Cambodian Americans. This project made with the Cambodian Temple of Silver Spring has received the support of Maryland State Arts Council.

“Cambodian Masters: Stories Told” presents you 7 pieces of 7 artists who have become Masters in their art, plus one piece introducing the whole story and project. I hope you’ll enjoy it as much as I had pleasure working on it!

These stories are not just about keeping the Cambodian arts alive, but it is also about healing, community, and family.

Link to the slideshows:

http://www.cambodian-buddhist.org/CambodianMasters/

Lives of Seven Masters Documented in US [-Thank you Stephane Janin for the documentation!]

A group of young girls, performed a traditional Khmer dance, through the Buddhist Society’s cultural program. (Photo: Courtesy of Buddhist Society, Inc.)

Im Sothearith, VOA Khmer
Maryland Friday, 30 April 2010

“We woke them up in the morning to come to the temple to practice. Now they are grown up, and they look back, they can speak fluent Cambodian, they can dance."

The journey and struggle of seven Cambodian master artists in the state of Maryland have now been documented in a multi-media collection that will soon be available to the public.

The project, funded by a Maryland state grant, was issued through the Cambodian Buddhist Society, based at Wat Buddhikarama in the town of Silver Spring, Md., and enabled multi-media producer Stephane Janin a chance to capture the memories of the masters.

“I went to see the artists; I interviewed them,” said Janin, who spent six months and hundreds of hours on the project. “I went to see them at their work, taking photos of them at their work. I scanned their archives. I came here several times, 15, 20 times, for the last six months.”

The seven masters—Ny Jewell, Masady Mani, Ngek Chum, Sochietah Ung, Viphas Hang, Puthyrith Sek, and Kantya Non—all work to train young Cambodian-Americans in Khmer arts, including classical and folk dance and classical music. Their most recent works, which received wide acclaim, were “Agangamasor” and “His Magic Power.”

A DVD displaying the project will soon be available at www.cambodian-buddhist.org.

“The overall purpose of the grant is to document, preserve and strengthen Cambodian culture and traditions,” Cynthia Way, a volunteer grant coordinator for the Buddhist Society, told VOA Khmer. “So, we wanted to document their rich history and the amazing struggle, as most of them are refugees who escaped genocide from Pol Pot. And we also wanted to pay them tribute for the amazing accomplishment of building this community.”

Say Raci, the Buddhist Society’s cultural affairs president, said the Maryland Tradition Grant played an essential role in documenting the lives of the seven masters.

“We have been working on preserving our national culture in this country for so long, but had never thought of documenting it,” she said. “Our arts and culture are maintained in those children who come to train.”

Way, whose daughter is adopted from Cambodia, said few people know the full story of the cultural group and how it started. The DVD will help document it, she said.

“People like Raci, who is part of the story, know the story,” she said. “But people like me who [are] new… they don’t know the story. They don’t know how this came to be and the challenges and the journey of their teachers, like the obstacles they overcame in order to be here and their commitment to keeping the art alive.”

Say Raci said that through the Buddhist Society’s cultural program, the younger Cambodian-American generation can participate in preserving the arts, culture and pride of their heritage.

“They are so proud of the project, which we started with difficulty,” she said. “We woke them up in the morning to come to the temple to practice. Now they are grown up, and they look back, they can speak fluent Cambodian, they can dance. So, they start to appreciate it 20 years later.”

Parents, meanwhile, have “come to realize that it is very important that the time they spend with their children here is not a waste,” she said. “It changes your children’s lives from being totally American to being proud of your heritage.”

Khmer Bokator revival

Cambodian Bokator fighters (Photo: AFP)

Cambodian Bokator grandmaster and founder of the Cambodian Yuthkun Federation, Sean Kim San (back) (Photo: AFP)

Cambodian Bokator students show their fighting technics (Photo: AFP)

Cambodia's 'Lion Fighters' rise again as martial art is revived (Photo: AFP)

Cambodia's 'Lion Fighters' rise again as martial art is revived

PHNOM PENH (AFP) — The rolling thunder of an oncoming monsoon storm provided the appropriate soundtrack to Ratanak Akthun's entrance into the ring.

The self-assured young fighter eyed his opponent, Puth Khemarak, who seemed less solid and a little dazed by the applause that greeted his own entrance into the gymnasium in Phnom Penh's Olympic Stadium.

Their clash was to be the first full-contact fight of last month's National Bokator Championships, and the crowd, made up of students from opposing fighting schools, clapped and shouted itself into a frenzy.

Cambodia's ancient martial art of bokator is enjoying a sudden revival after centuries of neglect and its near extinction under the communist Khmer Rouge regime, which outlawed the practice and murdered its masters.

But practitioners are struggling for legitimacy and purists say a younger generation's fascination with foreign martial arts is threatening this symbol of the country's past military might.

More an art form than a sport, bokator -- which literally means "lion fighter" in Cambodian -- has been somewhat derisively described as a dance with a little bit of fighting thrown in for effect.

This is not entirely untrue. Those who have mastered the thousands of punches, sweeping high kicks, take-downs and feints have a fluid animal grace that lulls the spectator into forgetting that this is a seriously dangerous fighting form.

But then erupts a violence that is found in few fighting rings. Like Saturday night brawlers, nearly bare-knuckled bokator fighters pummel, stomp and throttle each other into submission.

Ratanak Akthun's earlier cockiness could not save him from a crushing kick that broke ribs and sent him to a humiliating, semi-conscious departure from the ring.

The next two full-contact matches ended just as abruptly in knock-outs.

The September championships were only the second ever to be held and were the result of one man's singular crusade not just to return bokator to Cambodia, but also to introduce it to the rest of the world.

Sean Kim San, a bokator grandmaster and founder of the Cambodian Yuthkun Federation, returned from the United States in the 1990s and in 2004 opened a school to teach the craft to a new generation of Cambodians otherwise fed a diet of Thai kickboxing and Western professional wrestling.

"We had been sleeping for 1,000 years but 2004 was the new birth for bokator," said the 62-year-old master.

Speaking recently in the converted space above a parking garage that he shares with several other martial arts schools, Sean Kim San took out a few vinyl folders that he said are the sport's bible.

Inside he is creating, in painstaking detail, an index of the hundreds, if not thousands of moves that must be mastered at each level of bokator.

"Before there was nothing," he said, explaining that before he took up his quest to revive bokator, knowledge of the fighting form lay scattered across the country among its few surviving yet reluctant masters.

Scenes of bokator are carved into the walls of the Angkor temples, inextricably linked to a rich cultural heritage that goes back many hundreds of years.

But the Khmer Rouge who seized control of the country in 1975 and unleashed one of the 20th century's most devastating upheavals, inexplicably sought to destroy Bokator along with every other vestige of modern Cambodia.

Most of its practitioners were among the two million left dead by the time the regime was overthrown in 1979, and those still alive hid their talents out of fear, Sean Kim San said.

"The Khmer Rouge -- everything interesting they destroyed," he said, adding that after his return to Cambodia he unearthed about a dozen elderly bokator masters.

"But they were still scared about the killings, about Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge -- they were afraid to speak the truth," he said.

Still, he pieced together this puzzle, logging each swing or kick into his catalogue of bokator moves and slowly rebuilding interest in the ancient form.

Three years ago, he said he had only seven students in one school. Now more than 1,000 practice Bokator in schools across 10 provinces.

"We have about 400 or 500 students here, including some foreigners," he said of his own gym at the end of a ramshackle Phnom Penh side street. "This is how far we've raised up the sport."

Mathew Olsen, an Australian instructor of the Korean martial art hapkido and a bokator convert, said he had not known Cambodia had its own martial art.

"I was surprised there was something with such a wide spectrum -- the weapons, the punches, kicks, the ground fighting and pressure points makes it very lethal," he said during a recent training session.

"Bokator is a very complete martial art, very interesting to foreigners," he said. "Basically I think there is more art in this martial art than a lot of other martial arts."

While one of Sean Kim San's hopes is to introduce bokator to the wider world -- and eventual inclusion in international martial arts competitions -- a larger and more immediate goal is to keep this very Cambodian tradition alive at home.

"It is very important to pass this from generation to generation because this is our blood. This was passed down from grand masters and our kings," he said.

He has a dream, he said, that bokator training will become a regular feature in Cambodian primary schools.

"That means millions and millions of people know very well bokator," he said.

Kong Nai performance samples (Cambodia, 2006)