Soul survivors [Weyreap performance in Melbourne, Australia] - The Age
Soul survivors
October 1, 2005
Scenes from Weyreap's Battle, an episode from the Indian epic the Ramayana, whose stories form the basis of Cambodia's classical dance repertory.
Decimated under Pol Pot, Cambodia's unique dance and musical tradition is slowly re-emerging and Melbourne audiences now have a chance to see a rare performance, writes Robert Turnbull.
DURING the halcyon days of the 1960s, Jackie Kennedy, Tito and de Gaulle were among the rich and the powerful who travelled to the newly independent Cambodia to watch performers such as Pum Bun Chanrath dance the classical role of Hanuman, the Monkey King. It was an exciting time and performing artists were respected members of a vibrant and developing society. Chanrath shared a comfortable Phnom Penh home with his wife and daughter. He divided his time between teaching at the palace and dancing Hanuman at village pagodas.
The war completely changed Chanrath's life. After the evacuation of Phnom Penh by the Khmer Rouge on April 15, 1975, Chanrath's family was marched to Kompong Thom province to plant potatoes. The following year he spent six months in a Khmer Rouge jail, terrified of being exposed as a classical dancer. "If we keep you, we have no gain, without you we have no loss," was Pol Pot's notorious diktat. For artists and intellectuals, or anyone associated with the ancien regime, the threat of execution was constant.
Chanrath made a fateful decision - to tell the truth. "The interrogator asked me to dance Hanuman for him. I was dressed in nothing but an old cotton rice sack and I was so sick with malnutrition, I kept stumbling," he said. But the man kept laughing and shouting, "Hey, you, Hanuman, you will stay alive to dance for me."
And Chanrath did survive - he was one of the lucky ones. Some 90 per cent of the country's dancers died during the Khmer Rouge's four-year reign of terror, which decimated Cambodia's thousand-year-old performing arts tradition.
Reviving the country's classical dance culture has been a long, slow process. In 1982 the government organised a festival to show what was left of this heritage. Slowly survivors came forward to reveal the skills they had been at pains to hide, so the delicate process of documenting techniques preserved only in fragile memories could begin. By the mid '80s, complex dances, passed on by word of mouth and made up of literally thousands of gestures, had been rescued.
Chanrath has been involved in the battle to save the country's ancient dance tradition from the start.
After liberation in 1979, he remained in Kompong Thom to revive the kaol style under the direction of Chheng Phon, a future minister of culture who became the driving force behind the nationwide revival. In Phnom Penh in 1992, he joined 100 performers squatting in a derelict development known as Tonle Bassac.
With few resources - dancers were paid in rice and petrol - they passed on work opportunities and taught each other's children to dance and sing. There was even a small platform made of bits of old wood where wasp-waisted eight-year-olds danced the apsara for anyone who might contribute a few dollars.
A stone's throw away was the Suramarit theatre where Chanrath danced Hanuman before the wars. Miraculously still intact, the 1967 theatre had featured strongly in Prince Sihanouk's ambitious program for the arts.
After Pol Pot, the Suramarit became, once again, the focal point of Cambodia's intangible arts and the operational base of the Department of Performing Arts, a 268-strong company of dancers, musicians, acrobats and puppeteers working directly under Minister Chheng Phon.
It was here, on a makeshift concrete stage, that Chanrath spent five demanding months of 2003 assembling Weyreap's Battle. Not only was this the first fully staged kaol show to be seen in Phnom Penh since the end of the war but a complex spectacle made possible by a $15,000 grant from the US embassy, a fortune by Cambodian standards.
"Before Pol Pot, we had a single bed and two bamboo frames as sets, and for lighting, only the moon," he says. "Now we have the chance to use real props and electric lighting, as well as new, more lively choreography."
The roots of the kaol style are murky. Tenth-century Angkorian inscriptions make reference to male masked drama. However, according to historian Pich Tum Kravel, the genre emerged during the 13th-century religious conflicts. Angkor's exclusively female court dancers enjoyed rare privileges, but their proximity to power rendered them vulnerable.
If female dancers were sacrificed during the turmoil, explains Kravel, it might have spawned a male version of the Reamker in which female roles were also taken by men. A 17th-century text suggests kaol appeared regularly at Khmer New Year to entreat the gods for rain. It reached peak popularity during the 1960s when there were at least 30 troupes.
Kaol represents only one of about 20 theatrical forms, from classical dance and theatre to circus and folk art as well as ritual and ceremonial dances. There is hardly a holiday, wedding or funeral that isn't accompanied by some kind of performance.
Among the new dances added to the classical repertory during the '60s was the apsara, a short ensemble piece created by Sihanouk's mother, Queen Kossamak, for her dancer grand-daughter Bopha Devi, which became the symbol of Khmer dance abroad.
The energy invested in the recent revival could not have been possible without the impetus of Sihanouk, who saw performing culture not so much as a ritual but a democratic right and a question of national prestige. Western aid also has been the catalyst for much postwar activity.
In 1995, a mentorship program implemented by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Asian Cultural Centre focused on skills in all major performing disciplines. In 1992 UNESCO added Cambodia's classical dance to the World Heritage List, and there were highly symbolic tours to France and the US. And, as if to prevent the genre from stagnating, Samritechak (2002) - a classical dance version of Shakespeare's Othello created by the dancer Sophiline Shapiro - drew parallels between Sita, the Reamker's victim and heroine and Desdemona, while casting Iago as a monkey.
For the public this represented a major change. In the early '90s, classical dance was almost invariably tied to political events and inaccessible to ordinary Cambodians.
Today there's even occasionally the luxury of choosing between two or three performances in Phnom Penh, made possible by donations from abroad or local government bodies such as Amrita Performing Arts. And demand for these performances belies the notion that Cambodians have abandoned their traditional culture for karaoke and Thai pop music or television.
But a wholesale cultural revival requires equal commitment from the host country. Here lies the problem. While the Government pays frequent lip service to Cambodia's performing arts as the soul of the nation, it has been largely unable to build the necessary infrastructure to support the arts. The result has been a culture of dependency fostered by a government apparently willing to let others shoulder the burden.
Cambodia's position as one of the weakest economies in South-East Asia sets it apart from countries such as Malaysia and Thailand, where national cultural policies have long replaced political slogans and the performing arts are subsidised by the government and private sponsorship.
In Cambodia, 0.25 per cent of the national budget is spent on culture - a fraction of that of neighbouring Thailand. Performers are among the country's poorest civil servants.
On recent tours to France and the US, the newly gilded apsaras and tribal drummers are viewed as among Cambodia's most precious resources. We have a chance to judge for ourselves this week when Chanrath, the co-choreographer and production manager, and a company of 40 dancers and musicians bring Weyreap's Battle to the Melbourne International Arts Festival.
The genre is male-masked drama, or lakhaon kaol. Performed by an amalgam of Phnom Penh's Royal University of Fine Arts and the Department of Performing Arts of the Ministry of Culture, the 75-minute piece hails from the Reamker, the Khmer version of the Sanskrit Ramayana, which forms the kernel of Cambodia's classical repertory.
"If Cambodia's artists and their admirers remain upbeat it is largely because of increasing worldwide demand for their work. We hope the country will move to a position of accepting more financial responsibility for the arts," says Fred Frumberg, director of Amrita Performing Arts, the organisation behind this tour.
Meanwhile international donors and presenters can help create the kind of nurturing environment that encourages creativity, performance and mentorship. Weyreap's Battle is at the Arts Centre, Playhouse, from October 6 to 8. Visit melbournefestival.com.au for information.
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