A fearless life in the White Building (Bo ding)

I originally wrote this piece on 25th February 2012 before I had been back to the White Building after that first time. I had forgotten about it until recently and it seems a symbol of how Claire and I built a life as part of Phnom Penh. 

The White Building is the longest building in Cambodia. The claustrophobic flats cram hundreds of families into a series of concrete blocks connected by unlit walkways and stairwells. The White Building is notorious rather than desirable.

Anna in the blue shorts was the fearless adventurer who took us here. Ellen in the pink was equally at ease. I am sitting at the edge, unsure of how to join in I think.

On our first weekend in Phnom Penh, a fellow VSO volunteer took a few of us to an arts exhibition being held there. We struggled to find it as in Khmer it's called Bo Ding (which doesn't translate as White Building) and were a little nervous as we tried to find the safety of the exhibition amidst the dark clamour of normal White Building life.

The exhibition was called The White Night and showed the work of local residents who had received eight weeks of teaching in photography, visual and audio art and other "mixed media". The first art piece that caught my eye was a sculpture made up of random household objects like clocks, a lamp and a turtle.

I ended up speaking to the artists - 8 teenagers - who lived in wealthier areas but had created this art by asking inhabitants of the White Building for stuff. They used to be afraid of the White Building but could not believe how generous its inhabitants were in giving them stuff for their sculpture. They now viewed the people and the building differently.

This was one of Claire's favourite pieces and it really is amazing the skills and patience this woman must have.
Below is the description of the piece. 

The exhibition was spread out in disused flats, corridors and back alleys. And it was whilst winding our way through this warren that we passed a flat, which like many, had its doors wide open so you could see the main living area.Staring at me from over the dinner table was a blackboard with the present perfect tense at the top and various English phrases written underneath. Scrawled in chalk on the outside of the house's concrete wall were a list of English words and grammatical rules.

I could not help but stare. I never saw any of the family but I began to imagine what kind of people give their whole house over to helping their kids learn. Were these the type of people who would live in a building that deserved notoriety?

I then began to feel slightly fraudulent. The exhibition seemed to give a sense of pride to some of the White Building's inhabitants. They were no longer pariahs, heck even wealthy white foreigners were coming to their homes. Despite only meeting friendliness and character, I still felt uncomfortable there, uncertain if I was enjoying this forced experience or just surviving it. I wasn't sure that I would ever go back and felt shameful to be this kind of voyeur.

Claire and Boramy, who works for Amrita and dances for Khmer Ensemble Arts

It took a while, but we did go back. Claire worked for Amrita right beside it and made friends with many dancers who live there. There's been further arts exhibitions and dance performances that we've attended, and I've enjoyed the odd meal there recently. $1 for pork, rice and a fried egg is pretty hard value to beat.

Me getting food before going to see Boramy dance. Taken by Isabelle who read about the White Night Exhibition just before coming to Cambodia and now lives close to the White Building. 

Whilst I am now a lover of the White Building, others love the prime city centre location it sits on. There were rumours that a company were secretly buying flats one by one and then the Government recently announced that the building is unsafe and everybody will have to leave. A similar building nearby was violently evicted five years ago and the owner of the food stall above wasn't happy at that prospect or the low price being offered. Maybe the more we go, the safer it will be.

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!

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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!