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Some foreigners who witnessed the first festival in 1980—the one used to determine the number of survivors—expressed their surprise.  Surrounded by so much destruction, poverty, and upheaval, Khmer dance artists still made our tradition the highest priority.  A Catholic relief worker told Amitav Ghosh, “‘I could not believe that in a situation like that people would be thinking of music and dance.’”[412]  Yet it is not surprising when we understand the deep significance dance has had in Khmer society in its more than 1,000 years of existence.

The post-Khmer Rouge period clearly shows how Khmer dance can survive without the monarchy and in a time of heavy political unrest.  This is extremely important when we think about the post-Angkor period for which we have very little but enough evidence to establish that Khmer classical dance has always existed in the country since then.  Sure: the circumstances are not exactly the same.  But given the ritual significance of the art form and the cyclical nature of history, we can bet that dance persisted following the court's withdrawal from Angkor.  They, at least, did not experience a crippling, inhumane genocide that targeted culture for destruction.

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Chheng Phon, Chea Samy, Soth Sam On, Em Theay and the artists working after the Khmer Rouge regime would unknowingly serve as living proof as to how artistic communities can rebuild and thrive following and during moments of war and trauma.   Their work represents the survival of artistic legacies, the uplifting of the spirit of their people, and the healing of a nation.   Chheng Phon would later tell reporters, “We couldn’t wait . . . Dancing was the only way to fight emotional illness.”[413]

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In that same interview conducted in 1989, he mentioned his invitation to the Czech Minister of Culture to see his “hospital” full of broken sculptures.  He shared with the reporters a vision: “It is of an apsara with all its limbs and its head cut off.  It is flying in the sky, away from me, and I do not know when or how I can put it back together again.”[414]  This is an apt image for Khmer dance immediately following the Pol Pot regime, in which the artists worked to rebuild their art form gesture by gesture, student by student, and dance by dance.

It is impressive, magical even, that within the brevity of a few years, a new generation of dancers was already performing, reminding Khmer people and the world of our beauty, strength, and resilience.  Classical dance, and all the arts in Cambodia really, now had an added purpose of protesting the horrific violence and injustice that the artists and our people experienced—and it will forevermore have this purpose.  Regarding this, and the efforts of the artists, Toni Shapiro-Phim has written: “Creativity is a form of resistance to violation.  It is an attack on the fracture of the self, an attempt to determine fundamental aspects of one’s existence.”[415]

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With the art form and the country in a state of ruin, it is no surprise that a great impetus to preserve all that was left marked this period of dance practice.  It would become a framework that would be interpreted by the artists who followed the leadership of Chheng Phon, Chea Samy, and Soth Sam On in Cambodia—sometimes stiflingly so.  That said, acts of preservation and reconstruction are in and of themselves creative, as it is not possible to be exactly the same as those who came before us.  Two people, under the same teacher, dancing the same dance, at the same time, in the same place, cannot perform exactly the same.  What makes someone think that we can do so with the past?  In the end, our bodies are not the same nor are the experiences that shape how we see the world.  The dances themselves don’t stay the same either as our societies that imbue them with meaning and value change too.

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Having made my points about how Khmer classical dance has survived in Cambodia from the pre-Angkor and Angkor eras to this period—to our present day, a moment in history where no one would question the practice of Khmer dance in the country—I will briefly highlight some points in the ten or so years that followed the leadership of Chheng Phon, Chea Samy, and Soth Sam On in Cambodia.

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Immediately in the refugee camps and in the diaspora, surviving artists taught the dance form to a new generation of children.  In the case of the latter, they sometimes performed in the earliest days wearing Thai skirts and cardboard crowns with sequins sewn into them.  The re-opening of Cambodia to the world would allow for the importation of proper music recordings, costumes, and in fact, dance teachers.  Chheng Phon has said of this before an audience in Long Beach, California, “From Angkor Wat, seeds from that earth have been taken here and planted here and will grow and blossom in this new earth.”[416]  He is right, for now, despite the many challenges that dancers in the diaspora face—lack of access to daily training, the unviability of the dance as a career—some are now able to dance alongside dancers in Cambodia with no less refinement.

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On the other hand, the royal family returned in 1992 and the dance lyrics changed accordingly.  Princess Buppha Devi would later reconstitute the Royal Ballet of Cambodia drawing from students trained at the Royal University of Fine Arts (formerly the School of Fine Arts).  Although proclaimed in 2003, the art of Khmer classical dance would be inscribed onto UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2008 through lobby efforts headed by Princess Buppha Devi.  The dance school was sold to foreign developers and moved outside of the city and Cambodia’s re-opening to the world caused a boom in tourism that increasingly pushes dance towards a form of spectacle and entertainment.  And, amidst all of this, an at times detrimental preservationist attitude is perpetuated amongst a majority of the artists—even when they themselves are actively engaged in reinterpretation, change, transformation, and creation.

To that last bit, I would like to share an idea of Chheng Phon: “We should not take culture away from the people and put it into museums.  A cultural tradition, after all, is a tradition of creation.”[417]  In line with his words of wisdom, we will now understand the ways in which Khmer dance relates to its ancient roots by looking at examples of dance today, as expressions of creation.  First, we will look at reconstructions of Angkor through dance.  Next, Khmer dance ritual.  Then, I have collected videos of the many approaches Khmer artists are taking in dance, innovating with it, inside and outside of it, to keep the philosophical and spiritual foundations of the art form alive.  Finally, after much insistence from my peers—and in light of the fact that we only recently have writings from dancers after more than 1,000 years—I will talk about my own artistic practice and the ideas that motivate my work. 

In these sections, my voice as an artist will become most pronounced.  After all, calling forth the spirits of the past, retracing our histories, is about understanding our present as much as charting higher possibilities for our future.  Very recently in Cambodia for example, I heard a former student of Chheng Phon quote his teacher to say the same thing in another way, “Tov na?  Mok pi na?  Thveur ei?”  (“Where are you going?  Where do you come from?  What will you do?”)

As there exists no culture of constructive critique within Khmer artistic practice—other than the top-down stick of a teacher—perhaps my words may seem jarring or disrespectful to some.  I apologize beforehand.  But I have a love for and responsibility to the artistic tradition, and to Cambodia and to humanity, to nurture a culture of dialogue, inquiry, exploration, and growth.  How is progress made if we never share our ideas?  If we never say the things that need to be said?  Chheng Phon would not disagree:

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“If you do not know your culture, you cannot bring something new to the culture.  People are the masters and the products of their history.  Anything made in the twelfth century has its value in the twelfth century, and yet the past has value for the present . . . [Our] task is to write in a way that produces intelligence in people's minds . . . Writers should look at the effect of their writing in producing a culture of intelligence.”[418]

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In Cambodia and the diaspora today the trend has been to be the product of history.  Taking after Chheng Phon however, like the dance that both mirrors and shapes heaven and society, I strive and encourage artists of current and future generations to be both the product and the “master” of our histories.

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