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Cambodian Dance
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Cambodian
dance, Cambodian dancer,
dancing, traditional dance,
classic dance,
Cambodia, Cambodian,
Cambodia dance performance,
traditional dance,
entertainment.
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Beauty Born Of Pain - Dance, the Spirit of Cambodia
More than
one philosopher has questioned the viability of art in
the face of genocide. Yet art provides spiritual
sustenance for individuals throughout the horrors of
war. In the 1970s, Cambodia lost between 20 and 25
percent of its population, including 90 percent of its
artists, during its civil war and Khmer Rouge regime.
Dance,
along with other arts, had been central to Cambodian
culture as an expression and instrument of Cambodian
history.
Ever
since the surviving artists began to return to Phnom
Penh in 1979 from their exile in the Cambodian
countryside, their centuries-long dance tradition has
been experiencing a slow, successful, and sublime
resurrection, a traction of the fruits of which were
presented in the touring show "Dance, the Spirit of
Cambodia."
Forty
classical dancers, folk dancers, musicians, singers,
and costumers comprised the collaboration that brought
the audience to its feet. Whether one read the
program notes before or after the show, one gathered
a sense of the culture's connection with the rural, the
royal, and the divine.
The program opened with Robam Apsara, a dance created in
the 1950s under the tutelage of Queen Kossamak Nearyrath.
The robam
means dance and the apsara are celestial dancers.
The dance featured archetypal Cambodian movement
and gestures: A deliberate pace; hyper extended elbows,
wrists, and fingers; legs deeply flexed at the knee,
ankle, and toe joints; the heel up by the sacrum.
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Each step was a meditation, from heel to sole to
metatarsal to one toe at a time. |
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Every Cambodian dancer
exhibited a holistic awareness of the body.
The dancers
wore headdresses evocative of Angkor Wat as they walked
along a line in flat contact with the floor. Against the
polyphonic, linear progression of the pin peat ensemble
(one of the oldest types of Khmer musical ensembles),
the dancers rotated one-legged balances in slow
promenade or stood still as statues. Level changes were
nearly imperceptible as the dancers' shapes echoed the
carvings found on temple walls.
Women performed all
of the roles in Cambodian classical dance until the
mid-twentieth century,
so postures,
gestures, and costuming must convey gender. Artistic
Director Proeung Chhieng explained that a feminine
aesthetic of flexibility and suppleness are revered in
the culture and that aspiring dancers must endure
painful exercises during childhood to achieve the
necessary
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Cambodian dancer |
Cambodian Dance |
flexibility
in the wrist and finger joints.One dance that
did feature male performers was Robam
Tunsaong, a village dance learned and documented at the
Royal University of Fine Arts and reworked for
theatrical Cambodian dance presentation.
The Cambodian dance featured performers
in the roles of two oxen, a hunter, a tiger, and a
bumble bee. The movement for this rhythmic dance was
characterized by a dropped pelvis, a slight pitch in the
hips, and extraordinary facility for locomotion in a
squat position.
The company later performed the comedic procession dance
known as Chhayam. Percussionists and dancers in
celebratory mode entered from the house exit doors
wearing masks and red scarves. The basic elements of the
dance involved clowning, slapstick, flirtation, and a
performer impressing the crowd by lifting his drum high
above his head with his teeth.
The grand finale was an excerpt from Reamker,
the sixteenth-century Khmer version of
the Hindu epic Ramayana. The dance
featured the four principal characters
of Cambodian dance-dramas: the female
divinity or princess, the male divinity
or prince, the giant or ogre, and the
monkey. |
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The
Cambodian dance opened with the monkeys (a role
played by men since the mid-twentieth
century) in masks and tails, scratching
themselves and grooming each other.What ensued was the story of Preah
Ream (Prince Rama) and the rescue of his kidnapped wife
Neang Seda (Princess Sita) from the evil Krong Reap (Ravana).
In spite of the messages inherent in the Ramayana that
seem unpalatable to the Western sensibility, such as the
notion of trial by fire, the dance was a stunning
display of gold and light that bent our extreme notion
of virtuosity into something more subtle and exquisite. |
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The Cambodian
artists' commitment to the preservation and sharing of their
classical and folk art forms was in itself a life-affirming
ritual.
Using art as a mnemonic device for a culture's
collective memory, these dancers and musicians contributed to
the effort to stop the cycle of violence in this world, inviting
people to bear witness to beauty in order to remember violence.
Thus, art
was as connected with death as it was with life. Would
that we danced instead of bombed.
Review Dance Magazine by Sima Belmar,
COPYRIGHT Dance Magazine & Gale Group |
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Angkor dance, Cambodia,
apsara dance, Buddhist dance, Cambodia
apsara, Cambodia culture,
Cambodia cultures, Cambodia
customs,
Cambodia dance,
Cambodia dances, Cambodia dancing, Cambodia festival, Cambodian
dance, Cambodian dancer, dancing, traditional
dance, Cambodian classic dance.
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Cambodian Dance |
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