SACRED ROOTS I: THE ORIGINS OF KHMER DANCE

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Dance has always held a great significance in the cultures of Southeast Asia, as indicated by bronze funerary drums featuring images of dancers excavated in Cambodia and throughout the region.  The earliest inscriptions mentioning Khmer dance however date to the sixth century of the Common Era,[1] and early epigraphy tells us that dancers, besides their ancient association with funeral rites, were offered to both Hindu and Buddhist temples as kñum vrah rapam (servants of the sacred dance).[2]  Their primary responsibilities were to perform sacred choreographies believed to invoke the fall of life-giving rains, thus ensuring the fertility and prosperity of the land and the people.

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So valued and integral was the art form that dancers came from the full spectrum of Khmer society.  Both women and men, they were likely trained in the homes of nobility and royalty and later offered as acts of devotion and merit making.  This ritual function of the dancer was so potent and omnipresent in the Khmer belief that even King Jayavarmann I (r. 657 – 690 CE) and King Yasovarmann I (r. 889 – 910 CE) were noted to be skilled dancers.[3]  Certainly, in the Khmer conception, a ruler whose form was a vessel for the gods and ancestor spirits, whose body was capable of channeling the flow of essential waters, would have been a righteous and efficacious one.

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As further evidence of the dancer’s elevated place—and that of singers, musicians, puppeteers, and other artists—they were often listed in temple inscriptions immediately after the officials who founded the temple.[4]  They boasted Sanskrit names compared to the mundane Khmer names of other “slaves”[5] and some were able to amass a large amount of property[6] and “even had their own slaves.”[7]  This celebrated, high social status is only appropriate for a group of people who are seen as nothing less than semidivine, living bridges between heaven and earth.

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Chinese emissary Zhou Daguan, who visited the Khmer capital of Yasodharapura in 1296 CE (now known as Angkor), noted that the best musicians were sent to the palace to perform during the ngai lan which took place during New Year festivities.[8]  George Coedes translates this to the Khmer thngai ram or “day(s) of dancing”[9] whereas Peter Harris—translating directly from the Chinese text—transcribes the term as ailan, explaining that it was “a dance that selected female dancers perform daily in the palace.”[10]  Taking clues from other descriptions of the event however, Eveline Porée-Maspero has suggested that the ceremony is compatible to the contemporary practice of laeung neak ta​​; she believes it was “a performance in which the dancers became possessed by the territorial spirits of the kingdom for the purpose of obtaining rain.”[11]

Other inscriptions noted the utsava or “festivals” of which part the offering of and performance by dancers took place.  These festivals were staged four and sometimes five times a year and were referred to as mahotsava (the great festivals) and pañcotsava (the five religious festivals).[12]  Khmer linguist Saveros Pou has likened the former to the contemporary mahaosrab, a festival in which the king would make performances and games available to the public inside the palace.

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Inscriptions also indicate that dancers performed rpam, short dances now known as robam, as well as dramatic works from the Jataka (a collection of stories retelling the many incarnations of the Buddha).[13]  Given the historical dominance of Brahmanism at the Khmer court and evidence for dramatic performance since the sixth century, Paul Cravath has suggested that Hindu works of narrative nature were performed as well.[14]  Certainly, when at the twelfth-century temple of Banteay Samre, whose lintels depict scenes from the Jataka and the Reamker (the Khmer version of the Hindu Ramayana), whose ornamental panels feature dancers in a variety of poses, it becomes easier to believe that dance drama was a highly developed art form during the Angkor era if not before.  Drama, storytelling, and narrative art, in fact, are carved all over the temples of the ancient era. 

Reflecting the Khmer religious practice of syncretism, these dances and dramas—and the practice around them—possessed a prominent, foundational character of indigenous spiritual belief, that is, animism and ancestor worship.  Further evidence for the dance’s potent native roots are the fact that the earliest Khmer language inscriptions, which date from the seventh century, all use “the ancient Khmer root ram, which transforms to [r]amam or rapam, an identical term used consistently in modern Khmer.”[15]

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The most vivid evidence of Khmer dance in this period, and sometimes the most overlooked and misunderstood, are the thousands of figures carved into relief at the temples of Angkor.  Some scholars posit that these figures were modeled after the dance form itself—an idea which I believe too.

The sculptors carved images of gods and kings, goddesses and human dancers, scenes from daily life and history, and Buddhist and Hindu tales alike.  In dialogue with the larger sphere of Khmer art and culture, they rendered the arched backs, flexed fingers, and curvilinear postures of their dancing peers to bring these scenes to life.  What results is the documentation of an aesthetic value and quality that can still be seen in the body of the Khmer classical dancer today, from the centered, strongly uplifted torso to the angular relationship of the arms and hands to the figure’s body.  The sculptors captured formal qualities from the gentle curling of the toes to the deep smile that today's most skilled of Khmer dancers are able to express.

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Scholars such as Paul Cravath believe the Churning of the Ocean of Milk, as carved onto the walls of Angkor Wat, is an actual depiction of khaol, or male masked dance.[16]  He believes the performance was enacted during coronation ceremonies to assert the king’s role as the central force presiding over the kingdom and the cosmos it represented, whose harmonious control of these forces produced the apsara, celestial dancers, themselves.  Cravath notes that Thai dance experts believe this ritual was introduced to Thailand by way of Khmer artists, where it was known as the len dukdamban and performed as late as the reign of King Chulalongkorn (1868 – 1911).[17]

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