Cambodia: more than temples and Toul Sleng

In USA, there are some cities that are now forever defined by shootings at a high school. For many people, Cambodia is defined by its own tragedy of the Khmer Rouge. And that tragedy, like car crashes, draws people to see what happened. But imagine yourself to be from Columbine or to be in a car crash. Would you want the world to come and watch you?

The Missing Picture was recently nominated for an Oscar (best foreign language film), dealing with the director’s experience of the Khmer Rouge. It is a superb film but I felt uneasy asking my colleagues if they have seen it or heard about it because of its’ subject matter. I can understand why some Cambodians may just not want to talk about it.

There is a beer here that promotes being proud and drinking their beer and after years of war, it is understandable to find something that pride can be focussed upon. In Cambodia, pride is focussed on temples from the Angkor Empire when Angkor (ancient Cambodia) covered an area much larger than present day Cambodia. However, I think that sometimes the pride is not just for the temples but also for the Angkor Empire itself, the power it had and the area it covered.

Pride in the past can lead to a desire for a return to the past, which is not always possible. Indeed, it may not always be desirable as it can stoke past rivalry or enmity. It is important to find new things to be proud of.

Claire works for Amrita Performing Arts, which encourages classically trained dancers to explore the creation of a Cambodian form of contemporary dance.  Last week, they performed pieces choreographed by their own dancers to a hall packed with Cambodians and foreigners.

Traditional dance involves creating shapes such as these hands and feet. It is unbelievable how far they can bend fingers and hands. The shapes can be quite beautiful. This is an Amrita dancer in rehearsal.

A piece by two brothers explored their relationship growing up so close but realising that they might not stay so close forever. The final piece, Religion, mixed hip hop, contemporary and classical dance, and dancers, in a message (as I took it) that truth can appear in many guises and that each dancer (or person) finds a dance that is true for them. Each form can be celebrated.

Spontaneous applause, laughter and wonder erupted during the dances as the dancers showed grace, skill, emotion, athleticism, humour and understanding. Cambodia can remain proud of its traditional Apsara dancing but dance can evolve to become something new, created by contemporary Cambodians. You can see videos of their performances online. 

The athleticism shown by the dancers appears to be present in many Cambodians, which has always impressed me. It is hard not to be impressed watching small people leap skywards before powerfully spiking a volleyball down over the net. Similarly, I am in wonder when I see three people balanced on a bicycle cycling along a busy road – and even turning corners!

Athleticism and balance are to the fore in Phare PonleuSelpak, a Cambodian acrobatic circus. I have seen them many times now and each time there are moments when I laugh out loud in disbelief at what I am seeing. After one show during which males had performed gymnastic type acrobatics that I had thought possible only by Olympic gold medallists, I was gobsmacked to learn that they were aged 14 or 15.  Check out these films for extreme fire skipping and mesmerising juggling. 

Be it young dancers or acrobats, Cambodians do not just have to find pride in the past, they can also find it in the present.

Gordon

Culture vulture

After nearly ten years working the arts, and being lucky enough to see some form of great performance at least once a week for the last seven years at Horsecross, I wondered how I'd get on with a reduced dose of culture in my life moving here. I wasn't expecting that there would be nothing cultural to do here, far from it, but I knew that I wouldn't have as much or as easy access to it. Sitting at my desk at the Concert Hall I would regularly be able to listen in on rehearsals or walk a few steps and pop my head into the auditorium to see what was going on onstage. Knowing some of the great music and theatre performances I've missed since leaving Horsecross has made me a little homesick so I've really enjoyed the cultural fixes I've had here in Phnom Penh.

Unsurprisingly, the Khmer arts had a rough time of it during the Pol Pot regime. Artists were killed, along with other intellectuals, and there was no place for the arts, unless you count propaganda songs. After the overthrow of the regime the arts slowly, slowly began to come back to life with the handful of survivors who remembered the traditional dance, music, arts and crafts.

A few weeks ago we went to Sovanna Phum Theatre to watch one of their shows. Sovanna Phum have resurrected traditional music, dance and shadow puppetry. While there was sadly no shadow puppets in the performance we saw (next time!), there was drumming - all the musicians looked like they were having a ball -  dance, and the monkeys. Who were hilarious ...

This last pic shows me trying to play the Sralay - the guy to the right is the musician and he was really kind, letting me have a go. It's a bit like an oboe but you play with the reed actually in your mouth and it's perpendicular, not horizotal. Hard to explain, even harder to play. AND you need to be able to do circular breathing to play it! Fascinating to try.

Another night we went to the circus! A tent had been specially built and acrobats from Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos came to the city for three nights to perform.

never a good sign when there are
more performers than spectators

me and the circus tent

The show was meant to start at 5pm but when we got there at 4.50pm, to make sure that we got good seats, only about 20 people were there - in a 1000 seat tent... We waited till after 6pm and still nothing had started. We also wanted to go the opening of an arts festival that happened to be on the same night. Our City Festival is ten days of mostly contemporary visual art and architecture. I'd been helping them with press, and giving my two cents worth about design, so was invited to the private opening at the beautiful UNESCO building.

UNESCO building

So, we decided to scoot over to the opening, hear the speeches, watch the dance performance, look at the art, scoff some brownies and a glass of wine and then head back to the circus for just after 7pm.

We still saw over an hour of circus action - some of it amazing, others less so, but all in all a great night for $3!

amazing feat - firing an arrow from a bow into a balloon using your feet while doing a handstand! (Cambodia)

clowns from Laos

aerial silk acrobatics from Cambodia

the finale, complete with hula hoops covered in tinsel. Love it!

The next night we went to see Khmer Arts Ensemble, which was part of Our City Festival. The Ensemble are a Khmer traditional dance group who only perform in Cambodia every now and then. As this was part of the Festival the tickets were free and there was a bus to take us out to Takhmao (in Kandal province - one more province ticked off!). Their outdoor theatre is absolutely stunning - this is the backdrop

photo from Vinh Dao taken from Our City Festival Facebook page

We weren't allowed to take photos of the performance but I've borrowed some from the Festival's facebook page (all photos by Vinh Dao). All the dancing was done to live music and, while there wasn't a lot of jaw dropping 'how do they DO that?' moves, it was quite beautiful. 

The really unbelievable thing was the hand movements, or more specifically, the back bend of the hands. Hopefully you can get an idea of them from this photo. I can't even force my hand into these shapes, never mind do it while dancing!

And so, we hopped back on the bus and on to our other event of the night. And talk about one extreme to the next.

We went to a fundraiser for Tiny Toones. The website explains properly what TT do but basically street kids can go every day, for free, learn break dancing, hip hop, English, Khmer, computing and maths. These are some of the most disadvantaged, marginalised kids who don't really have great prospects in life - many will be begging or scavenging to help what family they have. Lots will take drugs. TT really does prove the power of the arts in transforming people's lives.

And so for the extremes. We went from a very sedate, beautiful structured evening to a hip hop night in a dark, smoky (yup, those rules haven't quite reached here) pub. It's very strange seeing eight year old kids in a pub...

We didn't see their whole show but did manage to see the older TT members do their final show (video above). They had a space about 3m square to dance in - very impressive!

-----

It's taken a while to write this and since then we've been to more cultural goings ons. And like buses, they all seem to come along at once!  On Friday we saw Tiny Toones again, this time dancing with a French company called Racines Carrées. It was another free show (loving the free stuff!) and absolutely brilliant. Gordon said at the end that he thought it was the best dance thing he'd ever seen. There were no pictures allowed and I'm not even going to begin to try and describe it - suffice to say, smart, impressive, funny and great hip hop dancing. And there was a tuk tuk on stage. Excellent stuff.

Then the NEXT night (which is actually last night as I type) we finally got to see the Battambang circus school, Phare Ponleu Selpak (which means, the brightness of art). They're another organisation that is using the arts for social good, helping young people out of poverty by training them to become professional artists and performers. They've got a temporary website here as their other one had been hacked (even this temporary one is one of the best websites I've seen in Cambodia...) I think the Cambodian performers we saw at the circus (in the big circus tent) were all from PPS.

The show was about a girl called Sokha who survived the Khmer Rouge regime, escaped to the refugee camps (I presume) moved abroad but then came back to Cambodia to help other survivors. Or this is what I took from it as there was no talking. It seems strange to say this about a circus, but it was one of the most moving things I've seen. Simple facial gestures, body movements and symbolic actions conveyed so much and I really found myself welling up at points. 

he's balancing on a board on a metal tube. With two people standing on his shoulders!

that's five men being held up by one...

The girl who played Sokha, and frankly the star of the show for me, was also the girl that we saw shooting the arrow into a ballon, with her feet, while balancing on her hands, at the circus night above. She did the same trick in this show but it was so much more impressive. The segment showed her falling asleep after she had left Cambodia and then the, really rather scary, Khmer Rouge invading her dreams and giving her nightmares. She then proceeded to 'dance' with the dream Khmer Rouge soldier, finally overcoming her dark dreams (symbolised by a balloon draped in dark material) by shooting them with an arrow. From her feet. While balancing on her hands. As you do.

She's sort of upside down here - face down into the ground,  body curved up and over
 then with the guy balancing on her hips!

beautiful acro-balancing

shooting a balloon while doing a handstand. I never quite managed that one in the playground at school...

It was impressively acrobatic, the live music and live painting (!) were brilliant and the acting was also top notch. Another fantastic night out.

So, I'm really pleased to say that I'm managing to get my cultural fixes here in the Penh. What's been great (and this is not meant to sound patronising) is the best things I've seen are the Cambodian arts. The Western arts I've seen here have been lacking. We went to one classical recital by a European trio which left me a bit cold (and not just because of the extreme air conditioning) and heard a European jazz duo which was frankly terrible (and cold - what is it with excessive air-conditioning!). There's a European jazz group who I really liked, even if the lead singer was doing his best to be Jamie Cullum, however, they perform in a bar on the Riverside which is full of old, generally fat, white men dining and drinking with young, generally beautiful, tiny Cambodian girls/women which is all a bit depressing. I'm a big fan of Khmer arts and looking forward to exploring it more. I'd love to give some of it a go so I'm off to start bending my fingers backward. If you hear squeals of pain, you know what it is!