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.

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