Emmanuele Phuon's Khmeropedies l & ll
Baryshnikov Arts Center, New York
June 25, 2010
by Tom Phillips
copyright 2010 by Tom Phillips
Much buzz was generated recently by "Dancing Across Borders," a documentary (I didn't see it) by a woman who discovers a teenage Cambodian classical dancer in Phnom Penh, and takes him to New York to become a ballet dancer. Less hoopla surrounds Emmanuele Phuon's ongoing project "Khmeropedies," but it strikes me as a worthier cause. She is working with classical Cambodian dancers, honoring their exquisite tradition, but at the same time helping them integrate it with western forms of dance.
In some ways, Cambodian dance is far more eloquent and expansive than ballet -- 4,500 hand and body gestures amount to a sign language used to act out the narratives of Hindu and Buddhist tradition. Its vocabulary is huge but its uses are narrow. Dancers play only the prescribed mythic roles of king, princess, giant, monkey. They never get to dance as or for themselves. That's where Phuon, a French-Cambodian who danced with Baryshnikov's White Oak Dance Project, comes in. She gathered four Cambodian dancers at a White Oak workshop in 2008, and let them experiment with whatever they wanted to do. The result is Khmeropedies -- a work-in-progress that aims to preserve the priceless legacy of Cambodian dance, at the same time letting it loose into the world of contemporary cool moves.
Khmeropedies l is a tour de force of classical dance by Chumvan Sodhachivary, a willowy young woman who specializes in male roles (traditionally played by female dancers in the royal palace, where men were only allowed to play the monkey role.) Bending her arms, hands, fingers, legs and feet at extreme angles, she tells a story to amuse the gods, in which she slips from character to character as quickly and gracefully as she rises from the floor to her knees, from knees to feet. It's a display of technical mastery in body-acting (the face remains deadpan, with only a stylized smile at the corners of the mouth.)
Khmeropedies ll is a bit of play-acting -- a dialogue between a traditional teacher, Sam Sathya, and three students who say they're weary of the constraints of classical dance. She scolds them, but they wind up grooving to the sound of a Cambodian rap group, Tiny Toones, made up of street kids in Phnom Penh. It's a start. The good thing about this piece is how much it preserves of the extraordinary skills of the dancers. Phon Sopheap seems to devolve as he transforms himself into a monkey, waddling and mugging, picking insects out of his fur and scratching his butt. Sathya, the teacher, ends the piece with a meditative solo, bourreeing slowly as she turns and practices the delicate hand movements that tell the story of Cambodian dance.
Historically, it's a tragic tale. Most of Cambodia's traditional artists were wiped out in the Khmer Rouge genocide of the 1970s. Emmanuele Phuon, a child dancer at the time, escaped to Europe with her family, on a French passport.
In a post-performance discussion, Phuon indicated her original idea was to mount some sort of memorial to the artists wiped out in the genocide. But her dancers, most of whom were born after the fall of the Khmer Rouge, wanted to focus on the present. This they have done, but seemingly without sacrificing any of their unique skill. Like Cambodian dance itself, it's a delicate balance.
Copyright 2010 by Tom Phillips
Photographs by Julieta Cervantes