Wednesday, May 25, 2011
Choreographer Emmanuèle Phuon breathes new life into ancient dance steps
"Blending two styles is dangerous and rarely works," Phuon concedes. "What I
tried to bring to this project was to view this ancient dance with a modern and
Western approach — to search for what it could become." (Courtesy of Esplanade
Singapore)
In cambodian dance, women play male or female roles or Giants
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
Charges Against Angkor Lighting Critic
Moeung Son (Photo: DAP-news)
Heng Reaksmey, VOA Khmer
Phnom Penh Tuesday, 24 May 2011
The Court of Appeals on Tuesday upheld a guilty verdict for a man accused of
disinformation, following public remarks critical of a lighting project at
Angkor Wat, but reduced the charges against him.
Moeung Sonn, who has fled the country, is facing a two-year prison sentence
following a suit brought by the government in 2009. He had disseminated public
remarks claiming the Apsara Authority was potentially damaging Angkor Wat by
installing a lighting system around the temple.
Apsara officials denied the lights, which have since been taken down, posed a
threat to the temple.
Moeung Sonn’s original charge of disinformation was dropped to “insulting” the
Cambodian people. His two-year sentence was upheld, but a fine against him was
dropped from about $3,500 to less than $1,000.
Defense attorney Sok Sam Oeun, executive director of the Cambodian Defenders
Project, said he work with the defendant’s family to appeal to the Supreme
Court.
Moeung Sonn’s wife, Yi Phally, 66, told reporters outside the court Wednesday
her husband had only intended to protect the temples, not criticize the
government. She also pointed out that the lights have since been taken down.
>
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
Choreographer Emmanuèle Phuon breathes new life into ancient dance steps
"Blending two styles is dangerous and rarely works," Phuon concedes. "What I
tried to bring to this project was to view this ancient dance with a modern and
Western approach — to search for what it could become." (Courtesy of Esplanade
Singapore)
In cambodian dance, women play male or female roles or Giants
May 25, 2011
Eastern Promises
By Patrick Sharbaugh
Charleston City Paper
In Pnomh Penh, the capital city of Cambodia, or in Siem Reap, the doorstep of
the famous Angkor temple complex, tourists can drop anywhere from a few riel to
a Franklin to watch reenactments — some more authentic than others — of the
traditional Khmer dances that were an integral part of court life. The Khmer
court ruled all of what is Southeast Asia today and luxuriated in the
miraculous carved-stone metropolis known as the City of Temples.
Young girls — only girls — from every corner and social stratum of the empire
were recruited for the hundreds-strong Khmer Royal Ballet, trained from the age
of six for a repertoire of romances, myths, pieces about the Buddha's life, and
ubiquitous South Asian epics such as the story of Sita and Rama known as The
Ramayana. In elaborate, bejeweled costumes with improbable headdresses, temple
dancers took on roles as the earthly representations of the heavenly apsaras
and devatas, entertainers of the gods, whose figures Khmer artists portrayed on
temple walls. Their highly stylized, graceful movements resembled a mercurial
mashup of tai chi and American sign language, where each gesture, or kbach, has
a specific meaning.
This ancient form of expression mostly disappeared centuries ago, when the
Khmer empire and its Royal Ballet were swallowed up by the jungle just as the
Italian Renaissance was about to flower on the other side of the globe. What
remained of it, in the Thai-influenced steps that characterized Kampuchian
traditional dance in the early 20th century, was very nearly wiped from human
memory by the systematized butchery of the Khmer Rouge in the late 1970s, when
every intellectual, artist, and educated Cambodian in Pol Pot's agrarian
communist utopia was targeted for death.
Yet it was to these ancient styles that world-traveled French choreographer
Emmanuèle Phuon found herself drawn two years ago. That these dance styles were
all but lost in their pure forms mattered not at all to her, for Phuon was more
interested in reinvention than in mimicry. After years of dancing with and for
artists as varied as Elisa Monte, Martha Clarke, Mikhail Baryshnikov, and Shen
Wei (whose Cambodian-infused work also appears in this year's festival), the
Cambodian-born emigré had begun wondering whether she might apply modern
Western techniques to the traditional Khmer styles of her homeland.
After all, Phuon observes, the two styles have more in common than what might
be immediately apparent. "In the West, modern dance is derived from ballet, and
in many aspects Khmer dance resembles ballet. They both were court dances,
required many years of training to achieve unnatural positions, and in both
cases they were essentially narrative, called for elaborate costumes, and were
extremely codified."
So the question arose for Phuon: Could Khmer dance take a similar path, or
could it not at least be inspired by "new" ideas from the West? "I wanted to
see if stylistically we could use the traditional vocabulary as a base, but
then transform it, cut it apart, mix it with floor work. In short, push it as
far as possible away from its original form and yet keep it recognizable."
But tinkering with what's considered a national cultural treasure is frowned
upon in some quarters, and many Cambodians wondered what needed "fixing" about
such a seemingly perfect expressive form, as much a part of the national
culture as the Angkor temples. For Phuon, the purpose was not to erase or edit
the past — the Khmer Rouge had achieved that quite well enough 35 years before
— but rather to build upon it. Her intent was not to preserve the art form, as
most previous efforts had attempted, but to develop this unique cultural
heritage into a more contemporary direction. With help from Fred Frumberg, an
American who started an NGO to support the Cambodian Performing Arts, and
Phnom Penh-based Amrita Performing Arts, Phuon spent three weeks in 2008 at the
Gilman Foundation's White Oak Plantation in Florida, workshopping her idea with
a team of dancers.
The result, which premiered in Phnom Penh in 2009, was a solo work entitled
Khmeropédies I, based upon the traditional character of the Apsara, a celestial
dancer whose task is to transmit the prayers of the common people to the gods.
On her knees, crawling and rolling upon the floor, she prays, telling the gods
stories. She experiences frustration when confronted with the lack of a godly
response, only to resume her prayers. The set and costumes are minimal: in the
background is a black-and-white picture, a close-up of an eye of the Buddha.
The dancer wears a white top and white pants to symbolize purity.
"In Cambodian dancing there are essentially four characters," Phuon explains.
"The male role, the female role, the giant, and the monkey. Gender and body
structure determine how a dancer is given a part: males can play giants or
monkeys only; females play giants, male, or female roles; 'bigger' women play
the giants or the male role."
Phuon followed up with Khmeropédies II, a piece for four dancers that levels a
more postmodern eye on its subject. In it, three young dancers experiment with
their respective roles, performing them to Western music and adding elements of
ballet and contemporary dance. In this piece, says Phuon, "When the monkey
tries to be a man and wants to dance with a woman, when the women do not want
to display the required smile anymore, and when all three dance to Cambodian
rap music, they are scorned by their teacher and master who reminds them of
their duty to uphold and respect tradition."
If Khmeropédies II sounds didactic, that's no accident. "It was meant for an
audience in Cambodia, where the debate of tradition versus innovation is still
very relevant and linked to questions of identity and nationalism. Innovation
in this case tries to find its source in Western dance and theatrical
processes, with or without success." But the approach, she says, is not merely
an intellectual one. It attempts to remain within the realm of entertainment
and popular art.
The recorded score relies upon traditional Khmer music, songs from the
Cambodian rap group Tiny Toones, as well as works by Ravel, Debussy, and their
French avant garde contemporary Erik Satie's early ambient compositions Trois
Gymnopédies, from which the dances take their name.
"The goal was not to erase this beautiful dance and to 'move on,' but, on the
contrary, to make it coexist with many different styles and make it relevant
again, to draw the Cambodian youth to many dance concerts and once again give
dance the importance it has had for many centuries."
For the arts, relevance is a fraught term in Cambodia today, even more so
perhaps than in the developed world where smartphones, social networks, Angry
Birds, tablet computers, a universe of adumbrated online content and
humanities-targeted budget cuts conspire to sap modern youths of any germ of
interest in artistic expression beyond the confines of YouTube and the local
cineplex. Cambodian kids are as distracted as the rest of us, to say nothing of
being immeasurably poorer, but their gaze is also deliberately fixed on the
present and future instead of on the horrors of that nation's recent past.
"We have stayed away from the Khmer Rouge story, for a simple reason: The
dancers were not interested in going there. Most of them are young and want to
look into the future. They are interested in what they can become. I've seen
many [dance] pieces on the subject and there have been countless books on it.
Maybe it's not a bad thing to look forward now."
Phuon herself was born and lived in Phnom Penh until 1975. She and her mother
Yvette Pierpaoli — the real-life French humanitarian upon whom John Le Carre
based his novel The Constant Gardener — managed to leave the country at the
last moment with a French passport, yet her father and two sisters were
captured and killed by the Khmer Rouge. Today a single sister survives the
family on her father's side.
And those "traditional" dance performances in Pnomh Penh and Siem Reap? "Most
classical dance in Cambodia is performed for tourists and is suffering from
that. The performances are short, designed for short attention spans. They are
a mere caricature of what Cambodian dance used to be.
"To make the decision to be a dancer in such a poor country can only be
motivated by passion and faith in art," she continues. "There are not many
opportunities for dancers in Cambodia to dance, outside of the three main
companies or for tourist shows. This incredible heritage must be preserved —
and it must also evolve in order to thrive. The challenge is to shift its
context from court dance, religious dance, and instrument of power to an
independent art form for a new space and mindset: the stage."
Patrick Sharbaugh is the City Paper's former arts editor. He currently teaches
in Vietnam at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Saigon.
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