KING SISOWATH & THE OPENING OF KHMER DANCE

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King Norodom died in 1904 and his half-brother Sisowath was crowned that same year.  The new king inherited the semblances of a monarch and, with that, stewardship of the palace dancers.  Two-thirds of them, in mourning of his brother’s death—or simply in desire for life beyond the palace walls—followed a Khmer court custom and left the reclusive realities of the troupe.[256]

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That same year, George Bois, tasked with curating the Indochina Exhibit at the Colonial Exhibition to be held in Marseille, came to Cambodia in search of Khmer dancers.  Refused by King Sisowath, Bois found dancers in the troupe of Naval Colonel de Monteiro, a Khmer of mixed-Portuguese ancestry.  His search for more dancers led him to a prison, where he discovered that “many [dancers] were also dismissed [from the palace] for reasons of financial necessity due to the smaller annual pension of the new king . . . many of these dancers ‘were immediately seized for debts by the Cambodian prison’ and incarcerated.”[257]  Finally, at the request of the Governor-General of French Indochina, King Sisowath agreed to send his dancers as well.[258]

 

The numbers vary, but Cravath mentions “forty-two dancers, eight chanters, eight dressers, two jewelers, ten male musicians, and two clowns”[259]—or by some accounts, nearly 100 artists.[260]  This was just a bit more than the "typical" dance troupe Bois describes, which was made of one kru lakhaon, ten neay rong characters, six yeak characters, two performers of sva, ten neang characters, and twelve minor dancers accompanied by nineteen chorus members and a ten-member pin peat.[261] 

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Nonetheless, the dancers arrived with King Sisowath in Marseille on June 11, 1906.  They were met by an enthusiastic city, one that had been tantalized weeks before with curious details about their lives.  Indeed, the French craving for the exotic was duly satiated and inflamed by the dancers, who caused a considerable stir upon the public imagination.  Bois wrote: "Every evening more than thirty thousand people crowded around the stage to watch the marvelous dolls, with their perfect figures, undulate, shimmering with rivulets of gold and precious stones, in the dazzle of electric lights.  It was crazy.  Cambodia, its King, and his dancers dominated every conversation.  Photographers swarmed the city like famished locusts.  The newspapers of Paris and Marseille vied to snap the most seductive picture."[262]

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A riot ensued in Paris when 5,000 tickets—3,800 more than the seats available— were issued to a single scheduled performance organized by Georges Leygues, the Minister of Colonies.  And “order was restored by the police only when Princess Soumphady ‘resentfully’ allowed a second performance at midnight.”[263]  It seems the entire spectrum of French society saw the dancers, including the esteemed artist August Rodin.  He passionately sketched and painted the dancers, following them from Paris back to Marseilles.

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When looking at the sketches and watercolors by Rodin, I get a sense of sound, musicality, and uninhibited movement.  And, when these images were exhibited in Cambodia for the first time, the late Soth Sam On—a former star performer of demon roles in the palace, my teacher’s teacher whose very own teacher was on that 1906 tour—said, “If you look to the position of the arm, it is not correct . . . It is too high.  But the energy is there.”[264]

 

Very importantly then, Rodin’s images serve as critical evidence for the aesthetic and formal connections of Khmer dance of the modern era to its roots at the courts of Angkor (and before).  When looking at one watercolor featuring five dancers, for example, the three front-facing dancers who lift their legs bear incredible similarities to the sculpted Khmer images of yogini, apsara, and other dancers.  This is no coincidence as, like the sculptors who came before him, Rodin was working to capture the most dynamic image possible as he translated three-dimensional bodies dancing in space and time into a static, two-dimensional format.

 

The Angkorean sculptural convention to denote dance then, often with one leg raised in the air or one ball of the foot on the ground (or sometimes both)—like the preference to depict the hands in chib—is equivalent to the Greek concept of contrapposto.  It is used to denote dance because it implies the energetic height in the transition of movement, “encompass[es] the tension as a figure changes from resting on a given leg to walking or running upon it.”[265]  By contrast, one can see the relative rigidity that results when a dancing figure is carved frontally with both feet on the ground at the tenth-century temple of Pre Rup.

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Of the dancers, the sculptor remarked:

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“There are stones so ancient that you can no longer date them.  When you see them, you think of millennia, and here life, living nature, is producing the same effect.  These Cambodians have given us everything that antiquity can contain, their own antiquity, which is just as valuable as ours.  We have lived three days from three thousand years ago.  It is impossible to see the human being brought to such perfection.  Only they and the Greeks have done it.”[266]

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