Khmer Dancing
Cambodia's intricate dance tradition, with 4,000 different gestures, was nearly wiped out by Pol Pot. John O'Mahoney sees it rise from the ashes in the country's fire-ravaged theatre
On the outskirts of Phnom Penh - well beyond the regular tourist stomping grounds of the Royal Palace and the Russian Market - lies one of the most curious cultural establishments in the world.
If you approach it from the main road, the Cambodian National Theatre looks like many of the other derelict buildings dotted around the city, if a little more modernist and angular. In 1994, it was gutted by fire, the result of some careless workmen and a gas stove. With no funds for reconstruction, it remains exactly as it must have appeared the morning after the blaze - a scorched shell, roofless, ravaged and open to the elements.
But it is only when you enter the building that you perceive the full extent of what's going on in this extraordinary theatre. Despite the devastation, it's a hive of activity. Actors practise their roles on a stage that is now little more than a mound of scorched concrete, overgrown with palm trees. Dancers lope around the rubble doing physical exercises, or swing gently in hammocks under the stage. An army of set-builders stagger over boulders in the gutted auditorium, putting the finishing touches to magnificent gilded pagodas and royal carriages.
In fact, everything continues as it must have done when this was a full, working performance space. "Before it was destroyed, this theatre was the best in Asia," says dancer Nup Samoeun, who has been with the company for 29 years. "Even though it has burned down, we still practise and do everything as before. We have no other place to go."
From a western perspective, the fact that this establishment manages to function and create works that tour the world is astounding. Its traditional dance piece Weyreap's Battle, a collaboration with the Cambodian University of Fine Arts and an independent outfit called Amrita Performing Arts, comes to the Barbican in London this week.
For Cambodians, the burned-out theatre is a symbol for the country's stubborn, beleaguered culture in general. Under the murderous regime of Pol Pot, which lasted from 1975-79, Cambodia and its people came under one of the most ferocious and sustained attacks in history. An estimated 1.7 million people were killed and many millions more displaced to the countryside, as the dictator tried to implement his brutal brand of rural socialism. Nowhere were the policies applied more barbarously than to artists, writers and intellectuals, with an estimated 90% wiped out. This included anyone with secondary or tertiary education. Even people wearing glasses risked summary execution, just for looking brainy.
Thirty years on, Cambodian culture has yet to recover. "There are only about 100 writers in this country," according to You Bo of the writer's union. "And of that amount, only about 10 have any decent level of education."
One cultural sphere that suffered particularly badly was Cambodia's 1,000-year-old dance tradition. Before the rise of the Khmer Rouge, there were about 30 troupes performing Lakhaon Kaol, the intricate, masked, all-male sacred form that boasts 4,000 gestures in its movement vocabulary. It was a tradition that existed exclusively in the minds and muscles of the masters who practised it - and thus was almost entirely obliterated during the Pol Pot genocide.
After the regime fell, the government launched a nationwide radio campaign to unearth surviving masters of the Kaol. The library of thousands of gestures was pieced together, like fragments of shattered earthenware. Even so, only a handful of the original companies were re-established, and these only on an ad hoc basis to perform for weddings and funerals.
So, when it came to staging Weyreap's Battle - the first major Kaol production in more than 30 years - the challenges were huge. "We travelled to tiny villages, only accessible by boat," says Fred Frumberg of Amrita. "We tracked down forgotten masters and brought them to the city to make the piece."
One of the choreographers of the piece, Pum Bun Chanrath, was famous in the 1960s and early 70s for his depiction of the role of Hanuman, the mighty Monkey King. But when the Khmer Rouge took over, he was thrown in jail and tortured; he seemed destined for execution. When his guards asked him about his profession, he plumped for the honest approach: "I told them I was a Monkey Dancer," he says. "The soldier had no idea what that was, and so asked me to give a demonstration. But I was so malnourished and thin that I couldn't even stand up. All I could do was a pathetic suggestion of itching and scratching." It was enough to send the guard into paroxysms of laughter, and he was kept alive - and well fed - for future performances. "About a month later, I was released from prison. Most of the people I knew perished. Perhaps it was the Monkey Dance that kept me alive."
To create Weyreap, Chanrath and his fellow masters spent five months in 2003, teaching the thousands of intricate hand gestures to a new generation of dancers, some of whom had never seen Kaol before. The result, which I saw performed in an open market square adjacent to the burned-out theatre, is an irrepressible, often naive riot of colour and tender-hearted good humour. When the platoons of monkey warriors arrive, they scratch their backsides, wriggle about and sniff each other. The sea creatures, with their giant papier-mache claws and flashing eyes, look for all the world like mythical Cambodian undersea ravers.
