Of Land And Sky: A Call for Performers
My childhood is hard to separate from a television. I remember watching Fellini’s Satyricon as a six year-old boy and shows like The Simpsons were a family staple. I remember Chinese action films and Thai soap operas, Bollywood musicals, and even more rare, Cambodian karaoke and cinema. Often outdated, low-budget productions salvaged from a devastating war, the Cambodian films in my early days were naturally less captivating. Yet, in my maturation as an artist and person, I cannot help but return to those same images and narratives hovering around me at that time, tasting and feeling the new meaning and resonance they now have.
I’m currently in the beginning stages of developing my next work, Of Land And Sky. Initially inspired by the closing scene of the Khmer classic, Tep Sodachan, the work recasts the seemingly impossible love between a princess of heaven and her peasant, human husband into the bodies of gay men.
Akara Lohet (Letters in Blood) is the song that concludes Tep Sodachan (1968), featuring vocals by Ros Serey Sothea and Sin Sisamuth. Tep Sodachan is performed by Vichara Dany and her husband is performed by Kong Sam Oeun. A translation of this song can be downloaded at the end of this post.
With Of Land And Sky, I am interested in questioning the wide gaps and distances society can create for lovers in their intimate embrace. What is this person’s educational background? How much money does he make? What are his spiritual beliefs? As pragmatism starts to pierce through my youthful idealism, I now understand the reasons my parents so often posed these questions to my elder siblings. And watching Tep Sodachan being dragged from her child and home by her father the King of Heaven, contemplating the vastness of the space between land and sky (and the even greater desire to reach out and reconnect through it) — the many structures and systems designed to keep people from sharing life become ever so visible and heartbreaking.
My family tells me I should marry a good person from a good family.
My friends tell me I should sacrifice happiness for comfort.
My society tells me that I am incapable of having a healthy, fruitful and lasting monogamous relationship with the type of people who make my heart race.
Thoughts like these have been passed on from parent to child, friend to friend, government to citizen for thousands of years of course but let’s not fail to mention that movement in the politics of love has been made. For example, in the United States today, it would only be the few and far between who would question the natural rightness of an interracial marriage. Yet the fact that it was only legalized a couple of decades ago hardly seems like progress when you consider nations like Cambodia whose mytho-historical origins are so much based upon the union of two different worlds and races.
What did love look like at a time without borders of race and nation? What is love transcendent of walls of class, religion, and social norm? Does love itself change when it manifests in different bodies, different places, and different times?
Of Land And Sky will answer that last question with a resounding no. By invoking and embodying this narrative and history through the images and melodies of Cambodian pop culture, through a myth passed from one generation to another, I armor myself with the knowledge of the past as I work to create a healthier, more equitable society and future. My body becomes a canvas for a social and spiritual, physical and psychological violence committed for centuries through out the world. It becomes witness to the desire and devotion of two ill-fated lovers. It becomes a testament to the love experienced by gay men all over the world today that is no less potent, no less true, no less virtuous, and no less susceptible to social pressure than those around them.
As of now, I’m seeking performers in the Los Angeles area who can help me bring this vision to life. It will be performed in whole or in part at CHIME LIVE!, the closing showcase for the Choreographers in Mentorship Exchange program which pairs young, emerging choreographers with their more established and experienced peers (I am working with the masterful Oguri). As the images and gestures run through my head, I imagine Of Land And Sky to be an, at times, humorous and absurd, tense and heart-wrenching meditation of dance, performance, video, and theater.
What is the effect created when juxtaposing two distant lovers connected by lines of sight with two lovers who although in close proximity — eye to eye, lip to lip — are so impossibly apart from one another?
What if we were to artfully illustrate the sexual union missing in the video on stage as a gesture of celebration, protest, and resilience?
What would it look like to minimalize the hyper-stylized form of Cambodian classical dance into an image-based and presence-driven movement vocabulary that speaks to the gestures of the actors in the film?
Does retelling this story ultimately recycle and re-propagate this sadness and violence? Or does it serve as a shell with which to contemplate our disorder, act as a containment of our mistakes — becomes a form outside of ourselves that we can observe, understand, and conquer?
So, if you’d like to help me give Tep Sodachan’s story contemporary relevance — shake up an unhealthy social order to push for a higher harmony — do share any ideas, feedback, impressions, or questions that you may have. And if you’re in the Los Angeles area and would like to perform, please contact me. No Cambodian classical dance experience is necessary.
