Death-Defying Dance

During the Khmer Rouge occupation of Cambodia from 1975 to 1979, dancers — like other artists — were targeted as enemies of the state. The Khmer Rouge “looked down on the ancien regime, feudalism, capitalism,” explains Proeung Chhien, former court dancer and artistic director of the Cambodian Royal Ballet. So dancers practiced their movements secretly.

Because the traditional role of court dancers was to communicate between humans and deities, dancers with an acute sense of duty found a way to fulfill this role privately. Those who were caught were killed. But an estimated 10 percent survived, and in 1981 a call went out for all remaining dancers to attend a festival in Phnom Penh. Since then, they’ve been trying to re-establish a full repertoire — but dance has no system of notation equivalent to sheet music, so it can only be preserved and passed down by people who know how to do it. “I remember some gestures; other teachers remember others, and we collect each other’s,” Chhien says.

The survivors immediately set about passing their art to the next generation, taking children orphaned by the war into their newly established school. The dancers who will perform at Lawrence’s Lied Center on Saturday come mainly from this group of students. Their tour — Dance, the Spirit of Cambodia — is scheduled to make twelve U.S. stops.

The most distinctive characteristic of Cambodian dance is its hand movements, which have been said to resemble flying butterflies and wriggling spiders. According to the Cambodian creation story, Cambodia was born of the union of earth (male) and water (female). The hand gestures evoke the serpent, a creature whose significance comes from its ability to live on both land and water. Dancers must perfect an estimated 450 basic gestures, and they perform rigorous exercises that encourage hyperextension of the elbows in order to carry them out.

The court dances are essentially prayers, and the “celestial dancers” are traditionally virgins whose purity places them somewhere between human beings and deities. While their ornate costumes may prove more enticing to Western audiences than habits, Chhien says that the dancers are the Cambodian equivalent of nuns — except that celestial dancers don’t just offer prayers; they provide entertainment as well.

The dances, as Chhien describes them, depict “the conflict between good and evil” and further instruct audiences “to love goodness and to struggle with evil.”

Having won their own struggle with evil, the teachers are still working to restore dances that have been lost or forgotten. In 1999, when the Cambodian Royal Ballet traveled to France, dancers saw video clips from a Royal Ballet performance in New York thirty years earlier. Chhien says that while finding such remnants is painful — he sees footage of colleagues who did not survive the Khmer Rouge — it can help him to recover lost dances.

“I am very proud to be a dancer,” says Chhien. “Among all the hundreds of species of flowers, one is Cambodian.”