Sitting below the vastness of the starry night sky in Kings Canyon, I've had the opportunity to tell this story to my filmmaking students each year.  There is a powerful magic in the way the fire lights their faces as they listen.  And when I look up to see the faces of the young girls, I can't help but feel my duty to keep this story alive — in word, in voice, in body. 

Once, a long time ago, there lived a powerful hermit.  He had under his tutelage three very capable and intelligent students and wanted to bestow a most precious gift upon the most deserving of them.  There was Moni Mekhala, goddess of the seas, and the storm demon Ream Eyso; Prince Vorachhun studied magic with the wise man as well.  Seeing their abilities, the hermit could not decide who to give his gift to so he conceived a contest in which the winner would receive the prize.  He told his students sitting in respect below him, whom he loved like his own children, “Whoever should bring me back a glass full of morning dew first will be master of this gift.”

The next morning Ream Eyso and Vorachhun rose with the sun to gather tiny drops of dew from countless leaves of countless trees in the forest; they rushed back to the hermit’s home only to find Moni Mekhala waiting for them there.  Unlike the men, she left her scarf out in the night to soak up the dew and had only to wring out the precious fluid into the glass.  This clever strategy earned her a crystal ball which she now held in her hand, her knowledge causing a powerful, blinding light to emanate it.  The demon and prince were given a diamond axe and magic dagger as consolation prizes, respectively.

Seeing the radiance of Moni Mekhala’s gift, Ream Eyso began to covet the object.  Desire and greed grew stronger in him with each passing moment and day, flowing through his blood and filling his bones.  He began to stalk the goddess through the skies, killing Vorachhun who was her ally, and trying to win the object from her through sweet words and later through violent threats.  Unfazed by all of this, Moni Mekhala calmly dismissed each of the demon’s advances. 

Finally, enraged and out of strategies, Ream Eyso flung his axe at the goddess but he was blinded when she threw the crystal ball into the air, generating lightning.  His axe missed its mark and the sound of it hitting the clouds unleashed thunder.  The conflict and union of their energies – of lightning and thunder, of good and evil, of femininity and masculinity – created the rains that fell to revive Prince Vorachhun, manifestation of the earth, and gave birth to the rain that the Cambodian people, who have lived in an agricultural society for millennia, depend on for survival.

Moni Mekhala looked upon Ream Eyso – her peer, perhaps once her friend, and like her, a newfound keeper of her teacher’s knowledge and tradition – as he struggled in his blinded rage.  In her compassion, the goddess chose to let him live and took his vulnerability as a chance to escape into the clouds.  Soon after, Ream Eyso recovered from this spell and retreated into the clouds to regain himself and stalk the goddess again, the two locked in an eternal struggle.

Moni Mekhala and Ream Eyso performed by the Royal Ballet of Cambodia in 1971.  Menh Kossany is Moni Mekhala; Soth Sam On is Ream Eyso.  Both of these women, trained my dance teacher Sophiline in various capacities.  Soth Sam On has passed away.  I received word on the last day of the TED2011 conference.

Performing Robam Apsara at the James Philip Ribiat-Finley Arts Endowment Fundraiser.

My friend Stephanie, who went to school with me at the San Francisco Art Institute, invited me to perform this past Friday.  Her fiancee passed away two years ago and she is raising funds for the James Philip Ribiat-Finley Arts Endowment.  Named in his honor, it seeks to provide scholarships for Los Angeles teens to pursue study of the arts.  I respect and admire her love for and devotion to her partner.  I wholeheartedly support and celebrate her commitment to make sure the next generation of young people have access to the richness and transformative abilities of art.

I took this opportunity to perform a traditional work, Robam Apsara.  Choreographed in the 1960s during the height of Cambodia's post-independence nationalism, it depicts celestial dancers who emerge from the stone walls of a temple to play in a garden of heaven.  They are led by Mera — their queen and mother of the Khmer race — who wears a white skirt as a symbol of her transcendent purity.

I stripped away the skirt.  I did away with the skin-colored leotard that implies toplessness.

Now, this may seem disrespectful to most and I can already imagine the many tomatoes that people will throw at me.  But I've been grappling with a lot of ideas surrounding my practice and this post, really, is something like "coming out" as a performer.  I've been told many times by my loving teacher, "I'm not ready for that," in regards to certain artistic decisions.  And lately, I am experiencing an increasingly larger feeling of distance — I haven't felt my teacher's hands mold my body for nearly a year and Cambodia seems evermore a faraway place and time.  Perhaps though, the furthest away I feel is when I am in the studio watching my teacher teach other dancers, sometimes teaching alongside her, realizing that I — even though one of her most devoted and accomplished students — could never perform on her stage the way my female peers could.

When will people be ready?  And how long will I put my own experience and growth on hold to be in line with others?

For the sake of time, I will list my decisions to perform like this in bullet form.

1)  Performance to me, even of secular work, is a ritual gesture.  In ritual, we make offerings.  There is something to be said of offering things that are singular and assymetrical in their arrangement — the things you can't get anywhere else.  I am offering myself to the world, to the traditon, to the gods in a way that only I can.  In this sense, the growth of these things only becomes more fuller, vivid, and beautiful.

2)  I am chasing a tradition and social norm older than that of the status quo.  In ancient days, according to Chinese sources, Cambodian men and women bathed naked in public with no sense of shame at all.  And further more, temple carvings depict bare-breasted male and female gods; they are transcendent and serene, their presence so unlike the shamed and "modest" bodies of today.

3) This is an example of using my limitations to find new possibilities.  In the past, this has come to mean that I use sound artists as opposed to a bad recording or pin peat musicians who do not play well.  I don't have anyone to costume me so I will strip that away as well.  I don't have any other dancers in the area who can perform on the same caliber so I will perform solo or use dancers who are mature in different forms (and therefore, draw upon new languages and images and histories etc).

4)  Although light in tone, this dance is the cultural jewel of Cambodia.  It is probably the most popular Cambodian classical dance and has a strong nationalism associated with it.  My decision to perform this, to embody the history and choreography and image with my male body, will upset many as it stresses personal ownership of the art form by the artist and not by the nation.  

5)  There is something to be said about the performance of the surface and the performance of khlem, essence.  In contemporary Cambodia, the dance form is becoming increasingly surface.  Am I pretty?  Am I pretty?  Is this a spectacle that the audience will enjoy?  And their movements suffer from this driving force.  I want to push it beyond that to keep this art form alive — it already almost died once, in the tragedies of the Khmer Rouge regime where roughly 90 percent of artists died.  Am I bending light?  Am I stillness punctauted by movement?  Am I touching the divine?  Am I tapping a universal, human place?  How will the world transform into a better place from this performance?  These are the questions that I will ask my students, the questions I will use to mold their bodies and characters for generations to come.

In closing, maybe the smallest gesture is the biggest revolution.  And sometimes, perhaps, the revolution is really not one at all.  The day after this, I saw a friend at a bomba show by Las Bomberas de la Bahia, an all-female bomba troupe from the San Francisco Bay Area.  The last time he saw me was at the Getty Center, where I did a lecture demonstration geared for kids and their families.  He said to me, "You did a really good job.  All of the parents around me were like, 'He can teach my kids any day.'"  

Well, I put myself on hold no more.  If they want me, they'll have to take it all.

Robam Apsara through the years:

Princess Buppha Devi performs Robam Apsara in the 1960s.

The Royal Ballet of Cambodia performs in Washington D.C. in 1971.  This tour was essentially an ambassadorial mission, to appeal for help from the American government in light of the ensuing civil chaos in Cambodia.  Mera is played by Vorn Savay, who now teaches my friends in France.

Dancers from the School of Fine Arts (once the Royal University of Fine Arts) perform Robam Apsara.  Its lyrics have been given a socialist agenda, taken after the newly formed government and its watchful Vietnamese neighbor.  My dance teacher, Sophiline, is in the front-right on the viewer's right.  Mera is played by Yim Devi, who now teaches on the East Coast.  Note the militance of the drums in the beginning and the red skirts, symbolic of socialism.

Robam Apsara performed by dancers of the Royal University of Fine Arts in Phnom Penh.  Mera is played by Ouk Solichumnith; she is a good example of a more technically and emotionally mature queen-mother.  I learned the dance from watching this video over and over as a seventeen year old boy.

The Royal Ballet of Cambodia repurposes Robam Aspara for Preah Thaong Neang Neak.  Sin Sakada, the soloist emerging in darkness, is the current apsara star.  Does anyone else see a real serious drop in technique and performativity from the above video?

I’ve never met Chea Samy but I’ve heard much about her.  She was once the leading performer of her day, known for portraying the demanding role of Moni Mekhala in Cambodian dance ritual.  She was a rumored consort of King Monivong and strangely, the sister-in-law of the communist radical known as Pol Pot.  And after the tragic destruction her brother brought upon humanity, she worked to rebuild and revive the spirit of a people and nation that was left in ruins.

She and her fellows ensured the survival and transmission of Cambodian classical dance.  They did this in an environment of shambles, of little resources, and knowing that only ten to twenty percent of their colleagues were able to escape the ashes of genocide.  Their most valuable resources — the knowledge of the eldest teachers — were at risk of being lost with the fast, inevitable decay and death of the old women’s bodies.

But their spirits remain alive.

In Cambodian dance ritual, there is a ceremony known as sompeah kru.  Literally meaning “prayer to the teachers”, it is a moment in which students make offerings of fruits and flowers, candles and incense, dance and music to their teachers, to the spirits of teachers now passed, and to the gods.  They seek the blessings of the spiritual world through their living teachers, connecting themselves to an artistic and philosophical and spiritual lineage more than a thousand years old.  They call to the spirits of those who came before them to witness the performance, to witness the continuation of their ideas and beliefs, and to witness truth and beauty.  And the spirits — ever-present caretakers of the art — sometimes use the dancers’ bodies as vehicles to live again, teach again, and offer advice.

In this act of possession, history is rendered alive.  It is something breathing and moving in present space.  It is an active agent capable of shaping the future.

I wanted to take this moment to do something of a digital sompeah kru, to remember the hard work and valuable contributions of those who came before me as I continue my development of Of Land And Sky.  As a young practitioner in the diaspora who works experimentally, I’ve had little contact with my teachers’ teachers but my love and respect for them is solid and unflinching.

Thank you Chheng Phon.  Thank you Soth Sam On.  Thank you Chea Samy.  The seeds of your tradition and knowledge have been planted all across the world, it will give life to both familiar as well as new, equally potent and differently beautiful artistic flowers.

It is with great excitement and honor that I share the rare video footage that inspired this post.  Thankfully with the wonders of technology, the spirits now have other forms in which to live once more.  We are transported back to 1994, nearly twenty years after the Khmer Rouge regime, where Chea Samy carries herself with a dignity and grace that defies the harsh tragedy and devastation of war.  The glimmer in her eyes as she watches her students practice, the gentle way she sculpts gender and writes history into their bodies — all this set to the vocal melody is nothing short of invigorating inspiration.  And how wonderful it is to watch the old matron, to see such a strong, resilient type of beauty!

Chea Samy died later that year.

Chea Samy first appears at 2:34.  The student that she teaches, Ouk Solichumnith, grew to be a beautiful dancer that was featured performing Robam Apsara in my last post.  Like her teacher, she became the leading performer of Moni Mekhala.

As I continue to develop my latest work Of Land And Sky, there is an image from the closing scene of Tep Sodachan that keeps coming to mind.  Stuck in the open, overwhelming sky, Tep Sodachan weeps for her distant husband amongst her fellow sisters.  They gently place their hands upon her as if to catch her should she fall, all the while preventing her from flying down to the man and life she desires.  This simultaneous gesture of support and imprisonment is something that I must really consider as a male choreographer setting images of woman on women and as a male performer assuming these very same roles.

Perhaps I’ll start this study of the feminine in 2007 when I first got a glimpse into the world of samba.  It is San Francisco Carnaval and, attracted by the large gathering of drummers on stage, my dear friend Daria and I make our way through the crowd to be in front.  The drummers are introduced as Grupo Samba Rio, led by the powerful Jorge Alabé who initiates an infectious and thunderous roar of drums that gets everyone dancing and screaming with joy. 

After some time twisting and turning, snaking and shaking in the very little room available, I stopped when the stage was transformed with the appearance of dancers.  Dressed in next to nothing with feathers, the seven beautiful, glitter-bodied women swung their hips from side to side like some rare and strange breed of birds from paradise.  I stood frozen at their sight, contemplating the ritual magic in the vibration of their feathers and feeling like I had known this all before.

Coincidentally, someone recorded this moment while standing right behind Daria and I.  Maisa Duke — who later became my samba teacher — and her Energia do Samba perform alongside Grupo Samba Rio.  Notice how Daria, immediately in front of the camera, claps and dances on in support of her fellow women.  I, standing to her left, stop and press my hands together in intense study.

This dancer has a softness in her movement.  That dancer has an explosive radiance.  She’s faking her smile.  The girl right next to her looks very nervous.  Thoughts raced through my head as I observed each detail of the performance, comparing my own experience as a dancer with that of those on stage.  And after some time, I surprised myself when I barely audibly said to myself, “These are the Brazilian apsara.”

And in many ways they are.

Dancers from the Royal University of Fine Arts in Phnom Penh perform Robam Apsara.  Choreographed in the 1960s, the dancers play celestial women who are the epitome of female grace and beauty in Cambodian culture.  Ouk Solichumnith, dressed in white, plays Mera who is queen of the apsara and mother of the Khmer race.

Now, this statement would probably anger “conservative” Cambodians.  How dare I compare the apsara — celestial dancers in the court of Indra who, today, are no less than a symbol of feminine grace as they are of the Cambodian heritage and nation — with women wearing almost nothing?  Any Khmer woman who dares reveal that much in public would be derided as a social deviant worthy of no respect.

But let me mention that the skin-colored leotards covering the dancers’ torsos are supposed to give the impression of being bare-breasted — just as the apsara at Angkor are depicted.  And in fact, when the Chinese diplomat Chou Ta Kaun visited the Angkorian court in the thirteenth century, he noted women walking around topless and bathing naked in public with no mention of shame at all.

This shift in Cambodian perceptions of the female body can probably be, among other things, associated with a shift in religious belief.  When the apsara were carved into the walls of Angkor Wat, Hinduism was the official religion of the royal court.  But today, Cambodia is a predominantly Buddhist country.  Women are now asked to cover their bodies in the presence of monks.  And in Theraveda Buddhism, the “small-wheel” school of Buddhism Cambodians prescribe to, women must first be reborn as men before they can attain enlightenment.  This patriarchal institution of a patriarchal society treats women radically different from its predecessor: a place where women held positions of power, a place where women were active in commerce — a place where the dancing female (and male) body was a form of spiritual capital, an agent between heaven and earth, and an active vehicle of prayer that ensured the fertility, life, and well-being of the people and land.

The sambista and apsara are also similar in that they are exports, are ambassadors of a nation’s ideal of female beauty.  And it is very interesting to note that they are choreographed very similarly.  The leading performer — indicated by a few extra costume embellishments — is surrounded by an even number of performers executing the same movement.  She is the center of gravity and when performing synchronous gestures with her counterparts, she and her fellows create a dance of balance, order, and harmony.  In this unison, in the lines they trace and form, they dance a sacred geometry and geography, dance beauty, dance strength, and dance the social possibilities and limitations of womanhood.  The stage becomes a condensation of multiple images of one ideal woman.  It is an explosive expression of her as well.

Let’s take a look at an example closer to home for most people.

Beyonce’s Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It)

The music video for Beyoncé’s Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It), features the same type of choreography as those seen above.  Notice how her back-up dancers — they may as well be the same person — for the most part execute symmetrical movements that frame and focus Beyoncé.  They have a quality of being less-than-but-the-same as the diva who is separated from the pack by an armlet and one-sleeve leotard.  (The shoulder-revealing one-sleeve is especially interesting to me as it occurs in contemporary Cambodian classical dance costumes for female characters, unlike Thai or Lao classical dance which employ similar but different costumes.)

At the risk of even more criticism, let me ask: is this video, at nearly 124 million views, another expression of an ages-old, archetypal woman?  Some type of universal expression of a sexually-potent, youthful queen?  And why is that one of the top comments for this video questions how “mesmerizing” three woman simply dancing the same movements can be?  Has this video received so much acclaim because it has successfully employed a formula for depicting what it means to be a woman? Or is this choreography merely an example of the human desire for and appreciation of pattern and order?  One thing for sure, if Beyoncé were to perform this on her own, it would have been radically different and less effective. 

I’m probably angering more Cambodians by associating the divine, transcendent apsara, as well as the symbols of nation and race their human counterparts are, with the mundane, saturated landscape of angst that is American pop culture.  But let’s look closer.

It can definitely be questioned if Beyoncé’s dance and song of liberation and power is even one at all.  She asserts and emphasizes her worth only by mouthing lyrics that reveal her ability to attract other men and by displaying her not-so-subtle sexuality.  What about things such as intelligence and independence, kindness and compassion?  And her dancers, although executing some fierce movements, have rather muted presences that ultimately feels dehumanized.  Is this dance women, or a type of woman, subject to a male gaze?  Or is Beyoncé some type of lipstick feminist who with the swing of a hip, with the flip of a wrist, is an authoritative object capable of shifting the internal universe created by the lights, camera, and editing in which the performance exists?

Like Beyoncé and her dancers, the human counterparts to the divine apsara are subject to a gaze as well.  In Robam Apsara, Mera — Queen of the apsara herself — emerges from the walls of an Angkorian temple to say, “Today I am happy to see the flowers growing in this garden.  I’ll make a bouquet of many flowers and place it next to me on my bed.  If you’d like, I’d love to give you this flower.”  It is important to note that in the lyrics, she refers to herself as p’oun as a wife would intimately to her husband, a younger sibling to an elder one, instead of using the gender- and status-neutral khniom.  Perhaps then, Mera dances not only for her husband and the male gaze but for the watchful eyes of older sisters and a lineage of women before her as well.  After all, women are just as much the strict enforcers of gender and social norms. 

Later in the dance, when the other performers appear, the lyrics take a third-person perspective that eventually states in the very last line that the apsara are “capable of pulling upon the emotions of men until they are addicted.”  Beauty and attractiveness is most certainly power in the world of the apsara and notice how Ouk Solichumnith looks directly into the camera — at her audience — at 9:32 as that phrase is completed.  On top of this, let me mention that in a Cambodian context, to my knowledge anyway, Mera is the only apsara given a name.  Perhaps it has to do with the fact that she is the only one of the spiritually virgin, pure, and transcendent maidens that someone has “put a ring on it.”  Her counterparts remain to us only as vibrant but cookie-cutter motifs dancing in line.  They are not to be mistaken with the devata, female guardian spirits who, although numbering near 1,700, are each rendered uniquely.

Are the sambista, the human apsara, Beyoncé and her dancers just different cultural renderings of the same woman?  And in this celebration of her, what is the line between the pedestal and the prison?

Technically, only dancing female figures are considered apsara (top).  Joyful and serene, they are small cookie-cutter decorative motifs adorning the temples of Angkor.  The devata, more well-known and mistaken as apsara, are each rendered with different jewelry, hair styles, faces, and postures (bottom).  The devata are individualism and idiosyncracy in an otherwise highly symmetrical, centrally-balanced temple structure.

I’ve struggled much with this very question.  I cannot tell you how many times through out my training where I have stood on the sidelines of the studio or the stage — my heart quietly breaking, invisible tears falling — as I watched my beloved teacher mold the bodies of young women into ideal men and women for an upcoming performance.  Most certainly, I can rehearse these roles, teach them even, but to go on stage in full female regalia to perform a traditional work would never happen no matter how much I demonstrate stronger technique and maturity as a performer.  It would never happen no matter how “radiant” or “spiritual” or “special” my teacher says I am as a dancer for I am not the ideal.

I am a gay male artist carrying on a way of moving and being for which women are the custodians and stakeholders.  I am a practitioner in a distant diaspora.  My face and body is scarred.  I do not think that all women have to look and act like apsara to be beautiful and worthy (although I appreciate the beauty of the image).  Have you ever witnessed the power of a dancer, white-haired and fingers shaking uncontrollably, practicing in the aging decay of her body?  Have you seen the gentle but solid grounding and connection to the earth that a bigger dancer has?  Somehow, my very presence as a dancer, as a teacher, as a choreographer, and as a thinker in this art form is nothing short of being a revolutionary frankentstein monster.  And somehow, still, I find myself to be so spiritually and politically attune with the art form as well. 

In the context of Cambodian performance, the embodying of the other gender is no new thing.  For example, Cambodian classical dance features women playing as women, men, and demons with men playing the acrobatic monkey roles; lakhaon khaol, a masked-dance drama performed entirely by men, enacts scenes from the Reamker, the Khmer version of the Ramayana.  Both of these art forms are of ritual import and in the case of Cambodian classical dance, some of the most sacred works depict none other than the harmonious courtship of male and female divinities (all played by women).  The dance then becomes not about the sexual union of male and female but an energetic one — of masculinity and femininity — manifested most by the ardhanari, the half-woman.  This image and being appears during Cambodian dance ritual in Robam Buong Suong Yokorn in which a Brahmin, half-man and half-woman (played by a woman as it is Cambodian classical dance), appears on stage to act as a messenger between heaven and earth, between the people and the gods.

So what does it mean for the male body to serve as a vehicle for the image of woman and perform her ritual choreography that seems to cross borders of race, place, and time?

The Banjee Boyz perform a choreography by AB Soto at Mustache Mondays in downtown Los Angeles.  Mustache Mondays is probably the best dance party in town.

For myself, a gay man in America, living in a structurally oppressive and violent society founded upon the gray limitations of puritanism, it is celebration.  It is defiance.  It is resistance.

Clenched fists swinging in the air, hips and booties thrusting aggressively, the Banjee Boyz display a militance in their spicy sass.  Their wrists fling like those of a flamboyant woman.  They mime gestures of anal and oral sex.  In the same balanced, highly-centered type of choreography, they manage to subvert social codes of gender while displaying those very same things.  They are, all at once, not man and not woman while being both of those things at the same time.  And their community of men and women cheer loudly in support.  (A dear friend prefers to see this video as “diversifying the spectrum of masculinity” as opposed to my approach in seeing it as the embodiment and questioning of femininity through gesture.) 

So how do we fully celebrate womanhood?  And how do we represent women in art without flattening a broad and diverse experience?  And is it possible to fully embody and protest at the same time?  It seems that I have more questions than answers so I’ll just end it here, with this image.

Ready to perform Robam Apsara as part of a demonstration at UCLA.

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.

Click here to download:

Akara_Lohet_(Translation).pdf (26 KB)

(download)

Click here to download:

Akara_Lohet_(Translation).pdf (26 KB)

On June 4, 2011, the Getty Center hosted a Cambodian-themed family festival in celebration of its exhibit, Gods of Angkor.  I was invited to give two fifteen-minute demonstrations of the gestural vocabulary of Cambodian classical dance.  Titled Transforming Nature: The Gestures of Cambodian Classical Dance, the presentation was a fun, participatory event for those present.

Rather than writing about it extensively (and for the sake of time), I’ve included a collection of photos with anecdotal text.  Thank you to Monorom Neth and Chad Sammeth for their generosity in allowing for me to use these images as well as Community Arts Resources (Los Angeles) and the Getty Center.

Backstage with some of my students from the Khmer Arts Academy, an amateur training ensemble in Long Beach, California that was founded by my teacher Sophiline Cheam Shapiro and her husband John in 2002.

I began my training at the Khmer Arts Academy as a seventeen year-old boy.  Since then, I have played a variety of roles with the organization as a teacher, curator, and media artist.  Now back and living in Long Beach, I teach on a volunteer basis whenever my busy schedule allows.

Photo by Monorom Neth

With a dear student in her flowering youth. 

Photo by Monorom Neth

All of the following photos are taken by this man here, Chad Sammeth, who is very active in the Cambodian American community in Long Beach.  His girlfriend was the former Managing Director of the Khmer Arts Academy and also studied dance with Neak Kru Sophiline.

Posing for a photo backstage with Mea, my junior who is now formally teaching at the Khmer Arts Academy.  She is dressed in a nearong (male) costume.  There are four major character types in Cambodian classical dance — female, male, demon, monkey — and with the exception of the acrobatic monkey roles, they are all played by women.  I, as a male practitioner of the roles performed by women, am a contemporary anomaly and an unlikely carrier of a heritage developed over a thousand years ago that was nearly destroyed in the 1970s during the Khmer Rouge genocide.

I opened up the lecture demonstration by performing an excerpt of Robam Apsara, perhaps the most popular Cambodian classical dance work.  Choreographed in the 1960s during the height of Cambodia’s post-independence nationalism, it was used as a means to reinvent and reintroduce Cambodia on the international stage.  In this work, Mera — Queen of the Apsara, mother of the Khmer race — emerges from the walls of Angkor to say, “Today I am happy to see the flowers growing in this garden.  If you’d like, I’d love to give you a flower.  In fact, I’ll give you this one.”

Note the serpentine curves of the body — arched back, bent knees, fingers flexed backwards, toes curled up create the impression of a snake who, in its fluid movement, is reminiscent of running water.  In its ritual context, Cambodian classical dance is a prayer in movement for the deliverance of the rain that brings fertility and life, regeneration and prosperity to an agricultural society.

Breaking the fourth wall to engage a distant audience.

Down to earth after embodying a mythical, archetypal image of beauty and woman.  After demonstrating the basic gestures of Cambodian classical dance, I talked about how Cambodian classical dance is a stylization and transformation of nature and human behavior. 

I then asked the kids if they wanted to see their parents on stage.

Adults in the audience react to seeing their peers strut their stuff to 1960s Cambodian rock.  The stage became a catwalk for brave volunteers to werque so that I could then stylize their walks, stances, and poses into a Cambodian classical dance aesthetic.

This is the exact song, with a nice summer funk to it that can be the soundtrack for this blog post: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTTpbG6HdiY

More reaction to seeing their peers on stage and my interpretation of their movements.

I then expounded upon the idea of dance being derived from mundane movement, revealing the mimetic qualities of the art form.  I showed people how to cry and how to laugh.  In this image, I assumed the role of a cautious prince, sword in hand (not shown), ready to engage his attacker.

A young girl imitates hand gestures while in the audience.

I asked the kids to help me make dances.  They had a chance to give me a sentence to illustrate using the vocabulary of Cambodian classical dance. 

On the floor, getting ready to perform the prompted sentence, “I am awake.”

Parents and students from the Khmer Arts Academy laugh on as I perform sentences so out of line with the mythopoetic world of Cambodian classical dance such as, “I want a puppy.”  The girl second from the right, is my youngest sister Khannia.  She is currently an apprentice to me in the Alliance for California Traditional Arts Master-Apprentice program.

Flying with beautiful, precious little spirits.

Children have always been very dear to me.  Before deciding to pursue art, I was set on teaching kindergarten.  While on stage with these radiant ones, I could not help but think of my late father who constantly asked me when I would become a father and give him grandchildren.

My father never saw me perform.  In fact, he was not pleased with my decision to pursue the arts.  For him, growing up at the mercy of the land, sun, and rain in rural Cambodia and surviving a brutal genocide, giving one’s life to the arts and the social and financial instability it usually means was very backwards. 

I’ve been dancing my father much in my latest choreography, not performing as him but bringing his life, history, and desires onto the stage with me.  If you’ve noticed the necklace that I am wearing at all, it was given to me by him and features an ebony Buddha as well as one of his teeth.

Magic at the Getty Center.