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By Deborah Jowitt Tuesday, Jul 6 2010 For centuries, Cambodian court dancers by the hundreds lived as the king's private all-female dance troupe—the little, pretty ones playing the women, the taller, stronger-faced ones the men; a few larger dancers took the roles of giants. After 1930, men assumed the monkey roles crucial to stories drawn from the Ramayana. With their slow elegance, brocaded costumes, steeple-shaped headdresses, and flexible fingers that made flowers blossom in the air, the royal dancers were obvious targets for the Khmer Rouge's purge of artists and intellectuals. Between 1975 and 1979, the majority of them perished. The few surviving masters had to rebuild the classical forms bit by bit. Emmanuèle Phuon, who has appeared with Baryshnikov's White Oak Dance Project and choreographers here and abroad, is half-French and half-Cambodian; she studied Khmer dance as a child. With the help of the Phnom Penh–based Amrita Performing Arts—a nongovernmental organization that focuses on both preserving Cambodia's traditional performing arts and encouraging creativity—she collaborated with three classical dance artists to create Khmeropédies I and II. The remarkable two-part event is no eclectic hybrid, with arabesques and the like grafted onto Cambodian steps. Utilizing postmodern strategies, Phuon and the dancers enlighten us about the style, while investigating how private emotions and more relaxed contemporary customs might take it in new directions. Erik Satie's Trois Gymnopédies, which figure in the recorded score (along with traditional music and compositions by Ravel, Debussy, and the Cambodian rap group Tiny Toones), exercise the pianist's fingers; this creative venture nudges Khmer antiquity into a respectful workout. The dancers wear no crowns; T-shirts top their wrapped practice pants. They show us the beautiful poses denoting the apsaras, the celestial dancers of myth who appear in the carvings of Angkor Wat. Standing calmly on one leg, a faint smile curling the ends of their mouths, they raise the other bent leg behind them until the sole of their foot forms a little table. A related position, done kneeling, refers, I believe, to kinnaris, half-human, half-bird divinities. And they have many wonderful, elegant ways of crawling—their hands curving back uncannily, their fingers telling of a tranquil landscape. But those hands can also form fists, and the dancers' grounded stances belie their apparent delicacy. Although Khmeropédies I, a solo for the tall, exquisite Chumvan Sodhachivy, begins in front of a slide that shows, in extreme close-up, the surface of an ancient, weather-pitted statue, and the accompanying sound suggests rocks tumbling down, the mood is serene and reverent. That is, until she begins to amuse the gods by telling a story. We don't know what she's saying, but she plays five different characters in conversation or conflict with one another (amazing!). There's a sweet girl, maybe a bit of a hypocrite, and an old man with a coarse voice and a bad cough. One person wonders just where another got that bracelet. Sodhachivy mimes being yanked back and forth, sometimes by her long hair. She maintains a dance pose until a force knocks her into rolling on the ground. Tags: Emmanuele Phuon Brings Khmeropedies I & II To Baryshnikov Arts Center
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