They Are Us

"Khmeropédies III: Source/Primate"
Emmanuèle Phuon
Peter B. Lewis Theater, Guggenheim Museum
New York, NY
April 30, 2013

By Martha Sherman
Copyright © 2013 by Martha Sherman

It’s hard to watch the men-monkeys of "Khmeropédies III: Source/Primate" and not be convinced they are evolution's missing link. Long before Darwin ignited his debate in the West, Cambodia had made that lineage clear through dance. In her dance offering for the Season of Cambodia festival, French-Cambodian choreographer Emmanuèlle Phuon has added to the richness of the Cambodian classical dance with a mix of anthropology and the contemporary artistic license. The layers take Phuon and the dancers of Cambodia’s  Amrita Performing Arts company back to where they started. These dancers have become primates.

Phuon performed with Elisa Monte and Baryshnikov White Oak Project, and most recently with post-modern dance icon, Yvonne Rainer.  Her main source for this piece is the Cambodian dance version of the Ramayana, originated over 1400 years ago. Its monkey dance was created from what the old masters observed in monkey behavior; their choreographic stylizations have been codified for centuries. The dancers of Amrita Performing Arts were all trained in that rigorous form.

Phuon's goal in her Khmeropédies trio was to both exploit the formality of classical Cambodian dance and the flexibility of contemporary choreography. In this third work of her series, Phuon focused on the monkey dance of the legends, and added science to the mix, working with anthropologist and paleontologist Eric Sargis to create movement vocabulary rigorously true to the primate sources of the piece’s title, including not just monkeys, but apes, chimpanzees, gibbons, and lemurs.

In a simple opening trio, Khon Chansina performed the rigorous traditional Cambodian monkey dance in the center of the stage. Framing him, two partners danced a modern reinterpretation created from intensely detailed and accurate portrayals of primate movement and behavior. The sources were videos and Sargis’ coaching, but freely adapted.  The three dancers morphed into their different monkey bodies, each onto bent knees and knuckles, but each unique. They scratched and twitched; they squawked monkey verbalizations. As Chansina shook his head, his knees shifted his weight, and his hands moved into stylized poses with thumbs wide and palms flat; the more modern monkeys flanking him rolled their shoulders into deep simian curves and chewed on their toes. Although the movements of the three were different, they were closely aligned; a believable trio linked by the close observations of the old masters of Cambodian dance and the modern observations of anthropology and paleontology.

The silent score was broken by driving Steve Reich percussion, and later to live keening vocalization (described by Sargis, in an opening panel discussion, as a near-perfect imitation of the gibbon call.) The percussion accompanied a fast, wild scene of scampering monkeys, the eight dancers racing across the stage, jumping on and off each other’s shoulders as if in weightless levitation. Patterns such as a square of four dancing monkeys showed a human’s interpretation, but they tumbled over each other’s bodies, their hands sliding over their heads in true monkey play.

In the final scene, the eight dancers sat in four pairs in a horizontal line. They became imperfect mirrors, matching and mimicking each other; a trio played leapfrog games. Startled by drums and the verbalized gibbon shriek, the dancers moved from play to aggression, slapping the floor and intimidating each other. After battling, they broke and lumbered offstage.

One of them, Nget Rady (whose high leaps had been among the most weightless,) remained curled in a ball. The rest of the monkey  troop came back to poke and prod; they rolled and smelled him, groomed him, and finally keened over him. One of his fellows put a traditional Cambodian white monkey mask on him. As they left, Rady’s body trembled spasmodically and he pulled at the mask, perhaps not ready to die, perhaps not willing to be hemmed behind the mask after the freedom of performing without it.

Phuon’s spanning of dance boundaries was most evident as the audience watched the performers transform themselves from men to primates and back at the lip of the stage’s proscenium. From their entry through the auditorium, the performers moved to a small space at the side of the house where three lockers stood. They stripped from sweatclothes into simple t-shirts and shorts, then several crumpled onto their knees in a prelude to becoming their characters.

When the performers walked over the invisible line that transitioned from the house to the stage, they became primates, the lines of their legs, shoulders, and faces sharpening into the lines of the animals. When a dancer left the scene and stepped back over the line to the anteroom, each became a man again, posture and face shifting, as he sat to watch and wait for his next entry. The fluidity of these transformations was offered through the vocabulary of contemporary dance. We chose to see monkeys, but Phuon never let us forget that they were men, transformed not only through the rigor of tradition, but also the magic of artistry.

copyright © 2013 by Martha Sherman

Photos by Pete Pin

Top:  Hing Seng Hong, Nget Rady (jumping)
Bottom: Chey Rithear, Khiev Sovannarith, Khon Chansina, Khon Chansethyka