Return of the Monkey King

Cambodia's intricate dance tradition, with 4,000 different gestures, was nearly wiped out by Pol Pot. John O'Mahoney sees it rise from the ashes in the country's fire-ravaged theatre

Monday March 26, 2007
The Guardian (UK)

On the outskirts of Phnom Penh - well beyond the regular tourist stomping grounds of the Royal Palace and the Russian Market - lies one of the most curious cultural establishments in the world.

If you approach it from the main road, the Cambodian National Theatre looks like many of the other derelict buildings dotted around the city, if a little more modernist and angular. In 1994, it was gutted by fire, the result of some careless workmen and a gas stove. With no funds for reconstruction, it remains exactly as it must have appeared the morning after the blaze - a scorched shell, roofless, ravaged and open to the elements.

But it is only when you enter the building that you perceive the full extent of what's going on in this extraordinary theatre. Despite the devastation, it's a hive of activity. Actors practise their roles on a stage that is now little more than a mound of scorched concrete, overgrown with palm trees. Dancers lope around the rubble doing physical exercises, or swing gently in hammocks under the stage. An army of set-builders stagger over boulders in the gutted auditorium, putting the finishing touches to magnificent gilded pagodas and royal carriages.

In fact, everything continues as it must have done when this was a full, working performance space. "Before it was destroyed, this theatre was the best in Asia," says dancer Nup Samoeun, who has been with the company for 29 years. "Even though it has burned down, we still practise and do everything as before. We have no other place to go."

From a western perspective, the fact that this establishment manages to function and create works that tour the world is astounding. Its traditional dance piece Weyreap's Battle, a collaboration with the Cambodian University of Fine Arts and an independent outfit called Amrita Performing Arts, comes to the Barbican in London this week.

For Cambodians, the burned-out theatre is a symbol for the country's stubborn, beleaguered culture in general. Under the murderous regime of Pol Pot, which lasted from 1975-79, Cambodia and its people came under one of the most ferocious and sustained attacks in history. An estimated 1.7 million people were killed and many millions more displaced to the countryside, as the dictator tried to implement his brutal brand of rural socialism. Nowhere were the policies applied more barbarously than to artists, writers and intellectuals, with an estimated 90% wiped out. This included anyone with secondary or tertiary education. Even people wearing glasses risked summary execution, just for looking brainy.

Thirty years on, Cambodian culture has yet to recover. "There are only about 100 writers in this country," according to You Bo of the writer's union. "And of that amount, only about 10 have any decent level of education."

One cultural sphere that suffered particularly badly was Cambodia's 1,000-year-old dance tradition. Before the rise of the Khmer Rouge, there were about 30 troupes performing Lakhaon Kaol, the intricate, masked, all-male sacred form that boasts 4,000 gestures in its movement vocabulary. It was a tradition that existed exclusively in the minds and muscles of the masters who practised it - and thus was almost entirely obliterated during the Pol Pot genocide.

After the regime fell, the government launched a nationwide radio campaign to unearth surviving masters of the Kaol. The library of thousands of gestures was pieced together, like fragments of shattered earthenware. Even so, only a handful of the original companies were re-established, and these only on an ad hoc basis to perform for weddings and funerals.

So, when it came to staging Weyreap's Battle - the first major Kaol production in more than 30 years - the challenges were huge. "We travelled to tiny villages, only accessible by boat," says Fred Frumberg of Amrita. "We tracked down forgotten masters and brought them to the city to make the piece."

One of the choreographers of the piece, Pum Bun Chanrath, was famous in the 1960s and early 70s for his depiction of the role of Hanuman, the mighty Monkey King. But when the Khmer Rouge took over, he was thrown in jail and tortured; he seemed destined for execution. When his guards asked him about his profession, he plumped for the honest approach: "I told them I was a Monkey Dancer," he says. "The soldier had no idea what that was, and so asked me to give a demonstration. But I was so malnourished and thin that I couldn't even stand up. All I could do was a pathetic suggestion of itching and scratching." It was enough to send the guard into paroxysms of laughter, and he was kept alive - and well fed - for future performances. "About a month later, I was released from prison. Most of the people I knew perished. Perhaps it was the Monkey Dance that kept me alive."

To create Weyreap, Chanrath and his fellow masters spent five months in 2003, teaching the thousands of intricate hand gestures to a new generation of dancers, some of whom had never seen Kaol before. The result, which I saw performed in an open market square adjacent to the burned-out theatre, is an irrepressible, often naive riot of colour and tender-hearted good humour. When the platoons of monkey warriors arrive, they scratch their backsides, wriggle about and sniff each other. The sea creatures, with their giant papier-mache claws and flashing eyes, look for all the world like mythical Cambodian undersea ravers.

Weyreap's Battle has been well received in Bangkok and Melbourne. With this week's performances at the Barbican, the piece will have gone some distance towards rescuing an art form on the brink of extinction.

· Weyreap's Battle is at the Barbican, London EC2, on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Box office: 020-7638 8891

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