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Celestial dancers on American soil - Cambodian dancers

Dance Magazine, Jan, 1996 by Deborah Jowitt

Among the people gathered in the rustic barn studio at Jacob's Pillow are very small children, high school girls, a couple of Gap salespeople, a supervisor at Pfizer Pharmaceuticals, a person who works in telemarketing for Sprint, another who's getting a degree in computer applications, a master teacher for the Connecticut Commission on the Arts, and the director of the Cambodian Network Council.

But whom do you actually see in the room so bright with gold and colored silks? Cambodian dancers and musicians: emigre professionals of a high order, children born or raised here, three master teacher-artists visiting from Cambodia. And on a July Thursday in the Berkshires, they're getting ready to perform Sampeah Kru, a pre-Hindu ritual in honor of their teachers - dead and living - and, by extension, the roles passed on and the spirit of dance itself.

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The Cambodian Artists Project started at Jacob's Pillow in 1991. Its teaching-performing residencies in Cambodian enclaves across the country usually involve large groups of student dancers; this one centers on video documentation. The purpose of the project is straightforward: to preserve, develop, and pass on to the next generation a form born in the courts and temples of the Khmer princes who built Angkor Wat. But for the Cambodian artists living in America, like project director Sam-Ang Sam and his wife, artistic director Chan Moly Sam, the task has an urgency beyond the exercise of their profession or the usual desire of immigrants to keep their customs alive. Between 1975 and 1979, during Pol Pot's regime, an estimated 90 percent of Cambodian artists and intellectuals were slaughtered or died of disease or starvation. When teachers, dancers, and musicians were lost, whole chunks of the court dance repertoire, carried in their memories, vanished with them. Now, although Cambodia's economy is shaky and its political future uncertain, dance is once again honored. And Cambodian artists on either side of the Pacific have an expanded mission: to pool knowledge and resources in order to piece together their heritage.

To Cambodians, their dance and its music are something more than a beloved theatrical form. Says Chan Moly Sam simply, "If we were to stop dancing, it would change the course of our lives. The dance holds everything together." Beyond being beautiful, the form embodies historical tradition, religious practice, and spiritual values. The guiding concepts of serenity and equilibrium provide a moral framework for living. Dancer Masady Meas stands poised on one leg, settling her body into a gentle arrangement of curves. She's demonstrating the dancer's quest for balance, both physical and inward. As she sits back down, she says without a pause, "In Cambodian life, when you do something you have to balance first; you have to think both ways. Which one is right? Think first. Not so quickly."

But imagine yourself a Cambodian artist among your roughly 250,000 compatriots in the U.S. You embrace some facets of American life, accommodate to others. Many avenues are open to you and your children. Your work may be supported by grants from such organizations as the Ford Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. However, propagating your art on foreign soil is not without pitfalls. "Cambodian court dancer" is not a job description that promises your children prosperity. They go to American schools, where peer pressure may war with family values. What do you do when your daughter wants to cut back on daily practice so she can be a cheerleader?

The studio in the New England woods quivers with activity. The two xylophones - one with wooden keys, the other with bamboo - are set out for the ritual by Sam-Ang Sam and visiting master Tath Sum. Young women, including the Sams' two daughters, Malene, nineteen, and Laksmi, sixteen, check themselves in the mirror, tugging at their tight, short-sleeved silk blouses. After they have knotted lengths of shimmering fabric about their waists, they help one another twist the ends into a rope that they pass between their legs and tuck into their belts. They are quite quiet this morning. You don't hear some of the beguilingly anachronistic rehearsal-break chit-chat of yesterday ("You are such a creep!") or see such sights as the girls affixing Walkman headphones to beautiful Devi Yim, a former star of the Classical Dance Company of Cambodia, so she can listen to the Janet Jackson song that they know she likes.

Beautiful, strong of spirit, Chan Moly Sam has tucked a lavender plantain lily from the perennial garden behind one ear, where it instantly looks tropical (Laksmi says fondly that her mom has a thing about flowers). She is carefully arranging objects on the makeshift altar. Lights set up for the cameras catch the gleam of the temple-spired gold headdresses peculiar to various characters and illumine the masks of Ream Eyso, the Storm-Spirit, and Hanuman, the heroic White Monkey. With these are other items, like scissors and perfumed spray, so that during the ceremony the masks can be symbolically groomed. In come platters of fruit, a raw chicken with feet, a cooked pig's head (not easy to come by in the Berkshires). There's a slight delay, because it turns out that some of the teenagers have eaten the popcorn needed for the rite, but no one rebukes them, nor does anyone call out to impish four-year-old Amarin Sam, who makes his red plastic Mighty Morphin Power Ranger dance jubilantly on Hanuman's head.

Celestial dancers on American soil - Cambodian dancers

Dance Magazine, Jan, 1996 by Deborah Jowitt

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