The first casaulty

The stack of human skulls piled high at Choueng Ek stands as gruesome testimony to the crimes of the Khmer Rouge. Thousands of black-and-white portraits at Toul Sleng offer yet more affirmation of the regime’s brutality. Then there is the court. The testimony. The tears.

Proof, it seems, could not be more conspicuous. But for the post-holocaust generation born after 1979, the stories of their elders are often too horrible to believe. Questions linger.

Is it really true?

That is the question posed by a group of Royal University of Phnom Penh (RUPP) students from this year’s graduating class. In a collection of short films of the same name, students from the department of media and communications explore life after the war, as lived by survivors.

“I would like to show these films abroad,” says Dr Tillman Baumgärtel, a visiting professor at RUPP Department of Media and Communications. “They give a different picture. It’s not the international filmmaker who comes here and shoots a movie in three weeks. It’s an on-the-ground perspective.”

For years, talk of the Khmer Rouge remained taboo. Prime Minister Hun Sen famously said the country should dig a hole and bury the past. The Extraordinary Courts of Cambodia, for all its failures, brought conversations about the country’s past into the fore. It proved a catalyst for bringing Khmer Rouge history into the high-school curriculum. The first history books to include Democratic Kampuchea landed on school desks in 2010. Until then, students had learned nothing of the brutality their parents endured.

Is it really true? answers the question not with documentary reportage but with short feature films. Some last only a few minutes, others longer. They strive for the same unbiased tone of television news, while tugging to unwrap the humanity of their protagonists.

In Grandma’s Story, the filmmaker’s grandmother tearfully recounts the day four Khmer Rouge soldiers came to take her husband away.  They said he could have the same job he held under the Lon Nol regime. He left in a horse cart, and she never saw him again. Not all of the stories are so heart wrenching. Two films explore music, Khmer Music After Year Zero and The Chapei Saved My Life, which tells the story of chapei master Prach Chhoun.

In A Concrete Memory, filmmakers Ith Sothoeuth and Em Sopheak travel with historian Henri Locard to the abandoned airstrip at Kampong Chhnang, where they find an old-timer by the name of Som Chhamom. He is thin with sharp features and thick, calloused hands. In deliberate, unemotional sentences, he recounts the airport’s construction with the unhurried pace of the old. “Those soldiers still did most of the work manually,” he says, a long ribbon of concrete runway stretched out behind him. “They cleaned up everything here and filled in the holes.”

Under Chinese direction, Khmers built the 2,400-metre runway plus an elaborate underground tunnel network and above ground water storage facility – virtually all of it by hand. Estimates of the dead range from 10,000 to 50,000 – no one knows for certain. “The Chinese had further ideas about this place,” explains Locard. “We suspect it was to be not just a Khmer Rouge air base but a Chinese air base.” Some speculate that it was the nearing completion of the runway that finally prompted Vietnam to invade in early 1979, thus bringing an end to Pol Pot’s era of homicidal mania.

Only recently have Khmer artists, and the country at large, began to address the past in earnest. “I think the students learn a lot from it,” says Dr Baumgärtel. “Their generation already talked about this issue in school, but not at great length, so for them, they learn new things.”

Speaking from the runway in Kampong Chhnang, Som Chhamom offers his own ruminations. “[The] next generation should take care and keep it for future interest,” he says, the red krama around his neck fluttering gently in the afternoon breeze. He is talking about the airport, and the toll it took to build, but he could easily be talking about the modern state and its caretakers.

“Don’t let it get more damaged,” he says, “because this was not an easy thing to build.”

WHO: RUPP Department of Media and Communications graduating class
WHAT: Short films exploring life after the Khmer Rouge
WHERE: Meta House, 37 Sotheros Blvd.
WHEN: Friday May 11
WHY: KR tales told by survivors, not outsiders

Storm on a G String

Notoriously self-critical 19th century German Romantic Johannes Brahms composed his Piano Quartet in G minor, Op. 25, during a particularly rocky time in his life. Not only had he relinquished posts in Detmold as a court piano teacher and choir conductor in favour of moving to Hamburg to conduct a women’s choir, he had also – despite being briefly engaged to Agathe von Siebold – fallen in love with his mentor’s wife and muse, noted pianist Clara Schumann (five months after Brahms blazed into their life, Robert Schumann tried to drown himself in the Rhine; he died two years later in an asylum). Being turned down for the position of Hamburg’s Philharmonic concert conductor at the same time did very little to improve his mood.

Brahms’ conflicting emotions found a fittingly cathartic outlet in his four-movement quartet, which despite taking him six years to finish moves swiftly from the spirited to the explosive. The Intermezzo during the second movement was written, so Brahms told Clara, while he was thinking ‘only of her’. The former child prodigy replied: “It lulled me into such gentle dreams, as if my soul was floating on the notes.” The finale, ‘alla Zingarese’, is of such extraordinary force that it prompted Hungarian violinist Joseph Joachim to declare that Brahms, a close personal friend, had dealt him “a resounding defeat” (another celebrated violinist, Josef Hellmesberger, said of Op. 25: “This is Beethoven’s legacy”).

No less revolutionary for its time was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Piano Quartet in G minor, KV 478, which, a century earlier, had paved the way for a new musical genre. For the first time in music history, the cello was given a voice of its own, independent from the bass line of the piano. Chamber music would never be the same again: now, the strings of the violin, viola and cello could be brought together in a united front complementing the piano. Alternatively, they could be separated, and each given equal prominence.

Today, both pieces are among the world’s most beloved classics – even though the enduring appeal of Mozart’s quartet wasn’t immediately obvious (his Viennese publisher FA Hoffmeister had commissioned three quartets, but after disappointing sales he offered to let the composer keep his advance in exchange for tearing up the contract). Fitting, then, that they will feature in a performance by Germany’s Notos Quartett at Meta House this month, alongside the lesser known but no less impressive Piano Quartet in A minor, Op. 67, by Spanish composer Joacquín Turina.

Together since 2007, the Frankfurt-based Notos Quartett is named after the god of the south wind – sometimes a gentle breeze, sometimes the bringer of storms – in ancient Greek mythology. Winners of the 2011 Parkhouse Award in London, and First Prize at the Charles-Hennen-Concours in Holland just a few days later, theirs promises to be a suitably tempestuous performance – the sort the country  is apparently developing quite the appetite for.

“In the 1960s, former King Norodom Sihanouk – a gifted musician himself – sent Cambodians to study Western Classical music in East Germany,” says Nico Mesterhaum, of Meta House, where the concert will be held. “His son Norodom Sihamoni, nowadays the King of Cambodia, enrolled at the Academy of Music Arts in Prague, Czechoslovakia to study classical dance and music. Then the civil war started. Arts and culture were destroyed by the Khmer Rouge regime.

“Nowadays, Western classical music is again new to Cambodia and Cambodians. Only a few Cambodian musicians have studied it, such as Loch Bonsamnang, Chan Vitharo, So Soronos and Him Savy, as well as established Cambodian composers Ung Chinnary and Him Sophy.

“Today there are no orchestras in Cambodia, unlike in Thailand and Vietnam. Most Cambodians only know this kind of music from TV or they have heard CD recordings, but to experience a master performance of Western classical music is a different thing. Nowadays, more and more Cambodians are joining such concerts, fascinated by the skills of the musicians and the depth of the music.”

WHO: Notos Quartett
WHAT: Piano quartets by Mozart, Brahms and Turina
WHERE: Meta House, #37 Sothearos Blvd
WHEN: 7pm May 17
WHY: It beats being Brahms and Liszt

 

Seeing red: angry canvases capture the fearful condition of modern man

Last month, The Scream – Norwegian artist Edvard Munch’s seminal expressionist work depicting existential angst – was brought to London. England was instantly aflush with the immense influence of this painting, considered by many as a portrayal of the fearful condition of modern man.

Now, here in Cambodia, another artist has taken human expression as a focus of his study on contemporary mankind. Long Kusal, the next artist to be celebrated in a solo exhibition at Romeet Gallery, is a philosopher as well as a painter. First and foremost, his paintings are about truth and the human condition and “portray problems towards the solutions”, Kusal says. His work is an experiment in destabilising overbearing truths or common perceptions.

Anarchy goes hand in hand with discontent and anger. Each of the 15 paintings in this show is painted in red, the colour of rage. Although some of the faces are smiling, Kusal insists that his expressions emerge from the same anger. “Even your smile is angry,” he says.

But the colour also has its connections with Buddhism, the methods of which Kusal relies upon for inspiration. In a state of meditation, Kusal once contemplated the thread which adorns the wrist of blessed Buddhists (also, their motorbikes and car wing-mirrors) – the first medium he worked in. Although he has since abandoned the thread itself, you can still see its influence in his paintings. The twisted lines which entangle his figures and emerge from their expressions are those same red threads, but in two-dimensional form.

These paintings contribute to a portrayal of the eternal human psychology. These are pure egos, illustrations of the “fear, shock, stress and sadness” which have driven mankind forever. “There are no positive ideas in my work, only conflict.”

Although the artist denies any positivity, a light emerges from this tyrannical will to see in concrete form the absence of hope. This hope can only emerge in the process of spectatorship. When people engage with Kusal’s work, they are faced with an unbearable image of humanity. Once engaged, they have the opportunity to contemplate the issue.

He doesn’t necessarily mean for his audience to leave depressed. “Once I have made the work, it is up to people what they make of it.” The creative process doesn’t end with Kusal. In fact, it has hardly begun. Art has the capacity to mean anything, he insists. “It can be funny, angry, positive and negative”. Art is pure potential; the ultimate power, then, rests with the audience.

WHO: Long Kusal
WHAT: Solo exhibition
WHERE: Romeet Gallery, #34E St. 178
WHEN: May 3
WHY: Rage on canvas

 

Rejected at home in USA,Poet embraced by olympics

It was something of a bolt out of the blue. Cambodian-American spoken-word artist Kosal Khiev got a call from Studio Revolt, where he’s currently the artist-in-residence: they needed to talk to him.

Next thing he knew, he found out he had been chosen to be Cambodia’s representative at the Poetry Parnassus, the poetry component of the literary festival that will be held in the lead-up to the London 2012 Olympic Games. It’s the largest event of its kind.

“I never saw it coming,” the 32-year-old said, adding that to this day, he doesn’t know who nominated him. “I think that’s just amazing that you can have an impact on people that you don’t know you have.”

On June 26, Kosal will go to London to take part in poetry readings and workshops with poets from the other 203 competing nations as part of the cultural Olympiad. One project is to “bomb” central London with 100,000 works from the participating poets.

“Instead of destructive bombs, they’re bombing love and the thoughts of poets who are trying to inspire, change and motivate,” he said.

Kosal’s own journey is one that has involved recent change, upheaval even, but which has provided a good deal of motivation for young people here in Cambodia. Born in a refugee camp in Thailand, Kosal’s family went to the United States when he was one, and he grew up there, immersed in American culture. But clashes with the law, a long stint in prison and the toughening of immigration rules in the wake of the 9/11 attacks resulted in Kosal being deported to Cambodia a little over a year ago—to a land he didn’t really know.

But since that time, he has flourished, finding a spiritual home here, honing the craft he began to practice behind bars and helping young people learn to express themselves through language.

In the lead-up to the trip to the UK, a country Kosal has never visited and where he will spend more than two weeks, he is working on new material and with Studio Revolt to document the whole process. One of his dominant themes these days is the idea of Cambodia as a mother, who at one point in the not-too-distant past was sick and hurting. She couldn’t take care of her kids and, in a way, told them to leave and go live elsewhere.

“She said, ‘when I am better, I will call you back’” Kosal said. “And now, I feel like Cambodia has called me home.”

He hopes that his participation in the trip can introduce more people around the world to Cambodia and give them a richer picture of the country, not one dominated by war and genocide. He wants to show them how far the country has come.

“The thing is, me and Cambodia, we have a similar story,” he said. “I don’t want to downplay what happened here, but we both come from struggle and adversity, and we survived.

“I think that’s why I was chosen. My story represents hope and survival, and that’s what Cambodia is about. I hope I can make the country proud.”

WHO: Spoken word artist Kosal Khiev
WHAT: The Poetry Parnassus
WHERE: Southbank Centre, London, UK
WHEN: June 26 – July 1
WHY: Poets of the world, unite!

Peace love music

Immortalised by Rolling Stone magazine as one of the 50 moments that forever changed the history of rock music, the famed Woodstock Festival of 1969 was far more than just three days of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll.

On the front page of a special report on the so-called ‘Aquarian Exposition’ by Rolling Stone’s editors, the photographer – shooting from over the shoulder of a young, shaggy haired Carlos Santana – captured an apparently endless ocean of human flesh, stretching from the front of the stage to the vanishing point of the festival’s sprawling 600-acre site in Bethel, New York.

High on marijuana and dancing naked in the mud, half a million devotees of hippie counter-culture flooded dairy farmer Max Yasgur’s fields between August 15 and 18. During ‘three days of peace and music’, 32 acts – including Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix, the Grateful Dead, and Janis Joplin – took the stage in one of the most pivotal moments in music history.

“Woodstock was a spark of beauty” where half a million kids “saw that they were part of a greater organism,” Joni Mitchell later said. Hers was a sentiment shared by Michael Lang, one of the organisers: “That’s what means the most to me – the connection to one another felt by all of us who worked on the festival, all those who came to it, and the millions who couldn’t be there but were touched by it.”

Among the festival’s audience was one of the owners of Indochina’s longest running rock ‘n’ roll bar, which this month will host its very own three-day rock-fest in tribute not only to the original ethos of Woodstock but also to emerging local talent. Then just 13 years old, he is today known as ‘Big Mike’ and is one of the chief architects of Sharky’s transformation from arms dealers’ den to legitimate showcase for new rock bands, both Khmer and barang.

“There’s a photograph of me at Woodstock with Jimi Hendrix,” says Shanghai-born Mike, balancing his large frame on a tiny stool in the bar’s cluttered rehearsal space, known as The Shark Cage. A bold handwritten notice taped to the outside of the glass door serves as a warning to would-be invaders: ‘BAND ONLY.’ Beneath the capital letters, in Biro chicken-scratch, someone has scrawled the words ‘and beautiful and available groupies’.

“I had no idea it even existed. I found it about four or five years ago when I went back to Woodstock. I went into a music store and asked the proprietor if he had any posters. He said: ‘Only one, in the front window, of Jimi Hendrix.’ I said: ‘Perfect!’ Hendrix was my hero. So I went outside and I’m looking at this poster and it’s Jimi Hendrix on stage at Woodstock – he was one of the last acts. I was really young, 13 I think. I’d gone with a few friends, was there for four days and stayed up way past my bedtime. I didn’t care about the mud. It was just on my mind to get to the front of the stage. I had to see Jimi Hendrix.

“So I’m looking at this photograph of Hendrix, with his drummer Noel Redding, and I thought: ‘That’s it! My God, I was there…’ And then all of a sudden, in the foreground of the photo, I see myself – wearing dark sunglasses that I still have and a hat that I lost – giving two peace signs. I fell in love with rock music at Woodstock.”

It was to prove a lasting romance. By the time the nascent punk movement of the 1970s was gaining momentum, Mike was old enough to start work – first as a bus boy, later as a music manager – at what would become New York City’s most legendary rock clubs. One of the first was Dr Generosity’s, a saloon at 73rd and 2nd on the East Side, where he met a young Keith Richards. “This was a starting place for rock stars,” says Mike, jet black hair cascading down to his shoulders, both wrists heavy with studded leather trinkets.

But it was at Max’s Kansas City, on the corner of Park Avenue and 17th Street, that Mike jabbed a needle into rock music’s main artery. The downstairs restaurant, where Debbie Harry once waited tables, was a hub for poets, painters, fashionistas and photographers; the seedy backroom was immortalised in Lou Reed’s Walk on the Wild Side. Upstairs was converted into a performance space where Patti Smith and Television played. “That’s when I began to know all the bands and I became a Hell’s Angel, because all the Angels came in on a Friday and Saturday night. Andy Warhol was afraid of them, so they had to go upstairs – and upstairs is where all the music was, where all the bands came.

“That’s where Iggy Pop and the Stooges got started, and The New York Dolls, David Bowie, Blondie before she was Blondie…  It was fantastic to see all these bands. It was the end of plastic rock and going into glam rock. I saw Bowie for the first time, cross-dressing. He was wearing all gold, totally all gold, and sparkles, with platform heels. I looked at him and said: ‘What have I got myself into?’ Then The New York Dolls came in and they were all cross-dressers too. But their music was fantastic. It was music I’d never heard before.”

More than a decade later, following tussles with both ends of the legal spectrum – the Hell’s Angels and the US authorities – Mike landed, via a stint in Bangkok, in Cambodia, a country still in the throes of civil war. “By 1996, Sharky’s was full of arms dealers and soldiers. That was the nature of our clientele – mainly military.

“It was very, very rough. We had a lot of drive-by shootings. We had a locker downstairs with about 12 AK47s and M16s in it. We had six rocket-propelled grenade launchers in the office, 12 RPGs, a box of 96 hand grenades, about eight to ten handguns, and everyone had to learn how to use them. It was tough. The change came right after 2000. I was walking down by the riverfront and I remember very distinctly that I saw a young, well-dressed European woman walking in high heels. I turned to my business partner and said: ‘It’s over.’ He said: ‘What’s over?’ I said: ‘The military. It’s over.’

“Suddenly, I remembered my past, with the Ramones, CBGBs, the Dead Kennedys, the Misfits, and all those bands. Having been friendly with them and having worked in that bar environment, at world famous punk and glam clubs, it hit me in the head. I said: ‘This place will be converted into a music club.’ So here we are: it’s 2012 and we’re now three years into the change.”

Sharky’s is budgeting another three years for that change to take full effect, hinging in part on the relaxation of local laws to allow bands to play deep into the night, but – like New York’s famous cradles of punk rock – the club is already spawning its own nascent scene. And the annual crescendo is Penhstock, when more than 30 bands will take the stage over three days.

“Penhstock is about my memories of Woodstock and my contribution to the alternative music scene here in Cambodia. The first year, we had five bands and we realised we needed to get more, so I begged the musicians to find splinters – get another musician from over here, and another musician from over there. We were able to turn five bands into eight bands within the space of three days. Last year, we were more fortunate and had 20, which began to allow us to turn this place into a showcase for young Khmer bands and alternative music – indie, rock and heavy metal. That’s what we did in New York – at Max’s, at CBGB’s, at Dr G’s – and some of those bands, like The New York Dolls, turned out to be huge.”

Among the local bands already making ample soundwaves are Cartoon Emo, who played at last year’s Penhstock and are now perhaps Cambodia’s most famous Khmer rock/heavy metal group. They released their first album of original music, Shadow, on Svang Dara Entertainment in 2010 in what Mike hopes will prove a precedent-setter.

“We’re also fortunate enough to showcase other Khmer bands such as Anti-Fate and Millennium. All of these are going to be headlining at Penhstock. The bands with the largest following will be the last on each night; the bands we feel will be very difficult acts to follow. On the Friday night, Herding Cats will be our last band. Their vocalist has what it takes to become an overwhelming personality on stage. Someone who’s out in front, right in your face, not ashamed of it, and if you don’t like it, go fuck off. That’s the kind of music I grew up with and I love it.

“Saturday’s last act is Sliten6, which we believe is the next Cartoon Emo. Last time they played here, they all took their shirts off and the crowd went crazy. They’re a very difficult act to follow. On Sunday night, to show our respect, we’re giving the show over to the longest running rock ‘n’ roll band here, Bum n Draze. They’re impossible to follow; great entertainers.

“Next year, we’re hoping to have 40 to 50 bands, possibly an outdoor venue. We’ll see where it goes, but this bar is going to be a stage for new Khmer and barang talent. We’re going to clean up the place a bit, but it has a certain grungy charm and that’s how it’s going to stay.”

WHO: 30 of the best local rock bands
WHAT: Penhstock III
WHERE: Sharky Bar, St. 130
WHEN: May 11 to 13
WHY: Southeast Asian rock music history in the making

 

Band of Kok Thlok musicians mark latest evolution in modern Khmer rock fusion

The music sounds like something discovered in the lost archives of Kampuchea radio – smoked-out ‘70s-era jungle rock laced with Khmer instruments and melodies. The sharp, plink-plink sounds of the Khmer xylophone bounce against distorted guitar in brooding, Grateful Dead-esque sonic landscapes. The tro – a single-stringed Khmer violin of sorts – screams along to funky bass lines and moody, expressive breaks.

The music spilling from the Kok Thlok house in far west Phnom Penh is the latest collaborative effort of Gildas Maronneaud, a pre-school music teacher and instrumental force in the local music scene. His band remains nameless, and others involved remain coy about the “contemporary experimental” project built on Khmer and Western instrumentation. The nucleus comprises Kanika Pheang on drums and tro; Phat Sothlideth on the roneat, or Khmer xylophone, Adrian Jayraed on guitars, and Maronneaud on bass.

“It’s not about me,” says Maronneaud, the group’s uncomfortable French-Khmer spokesman. “It’s about the Khmer musicians. They are really, really good. They are masters.” The capital will get its first taste of the band on May 5, when the group and friends descend on The Alley Cat Cafe for a Cinco de Mayo party. “I will invite many artists from Kok Thlok to come,” Adrian says. “And we will jam.”

In the face of the imminent destruction of the Preah Suramarit National Theatre in 2008, the performers living there needed a new place to call home. Kok Thlok, founded in 2006, was largely a reaction to the theatre’s demise, and the group continues to play an important role at the centre of modern performing arts.

“Kok Thlok used to play lots of concerts with electric and traditional instruments, old Khmer rock ‘n’ roll songs,” Adrian explains. “They can play all those old songs, and they play them with the roneat and the tro. And it’s really interesting, because when you do a party and the roneat and the tro can answer, question and answer, it’s really crazy, very beautiful.”

Anonymous beginnings are something of a forte for The Alley Cat Cafe, an intimate, diner-style Mexicana joint located on the Street 19 alley. In 2006, a Tasmanian guitarist named Julian Poulson had recently befriended an intoxicating young female vocalist by the name of Kak Chanthy. The two had chemistry, and friends at the restaurant offered up a slice of the dining room floor to try out their new sound on a live audience.

Maronneaud, invited by Poulson, was at The Alley Cat that night, too. Then, as now, the band had no name, and few involved would dare speculate about what, if any, promise the future held. From that initial jam session, Poulson went on to build The Cambodian Space Project, a band of which Maronneaud is still a “huge” part.

For family and work reasons – he is a husband, father and teacher – Maronneaud prefers to play close to home, and these days, CSP is often on the road and outside the country. His latest project is in some ways an attempt to form a band that will not require such travel commitments. It is also, in deeper ways, a means to connect with his heritage. “I prefer to play with Khmer musicians,” he says. “I am half Khmer.”

Working alongside Kanika Pheang and Phat Sothlideth, the three form an easy relationship, their musical synergies evident in the music they make. It is the foundation on which some greater musical endeavor could surely can be built, and their Cinco de Mayo show holds as much promise as that first anonymous Alley Cat show, even if no one dares to say it.

WHO: Kok Thlok & associates
WHAT: Khmer rock fusion
WHEN: 8:30pm May 5
WHERE: The Alley Cat Cafe, St. 19 Alley
WHY: They could well go into the annals of Phnom Penh musical lore

Twist on a bloody classic

The gallows looms large and lethal over the audience, its menacing L-shaped frame stretching towards the sky; at the scaffold’s morbid side, a fearsome life-sized coffin. This is the fear of death in its naked, most terrifying glory. Suddenly, a young woman swathed in 19th century clothing appears. “Are you looking forward to it, too?” she asks the audience, in a bloodthirsty Cockney twang, of the looming public execution.

The second of English author Charles Dickens’ novels, Oliver Twist – the tale of a naive nine-year-old orphan’s miserable existence among a gang of juvenile London pickpockets, first published in serial form between 1837 and 1839 – remains, according to The Children of Charles Dickens author Frank Donovan, one of English literature’s bluntest portrayals of criminals and their sordid lives.

Also known as The Parish Boy’s Progress, this seminal work of Dickens – a child labourer in his early youth – exposes the brutal treatment of many a waif in Victorian London.

His literary model has undergone many transformations since it was first released, perhaps most notably the1968 Academy Award-winning film starring Ron Moody as criminal mastermind Fagin, and one of the most recent is being brought to Cambodia by Britain’s TNT Theatre this week.

In their charming stage adaptation, directors Paul Stebbings and Phil Smith have successfully condensed Dickens’ 500-page novel featuring more than 50 characters into a 90-minute play requiring only five actors.

No mean feat, given the social structures of the day that Dickens is portraying. For this is a world in which poverty and crime go hand-in-hand; in which the ultimate penalty is to hang from a noose until dead, no matter how bad a hand the cards may have dealt you.Here lies the turf of gallows humour, a big city being steered by the criminal underworld – a model that, despite the passage of centuries, still manifests itself in the urban nightmares that plague us today.

But even gallows humour is humour of a sort, and it’s not without a generous helping of slapstick the TNT approach their tragic subject – which is seen in this adaptation through the dying eyes of Fagin as he awaits execution, trying to justify his life of crime. Switching between roles at lightning speed, actors are one minute the money grubbing Mrs Corney, the next the Artful Dodger; first the big-hearted whore Nancy, then the murderous Bill Sykes.

Thomas Johnson’s original score, according to the critics, somehow makes it darker and more real; an effect also achieved by Arno Scholz and Paul Stebbings’s set design.

“The enormous energy of these characters and the full bloodied portrait of the first modern urban nightmare, London, make the story not only exciting and dramatic, but also truly contemporary,” said a spokesman for TNT Theatre.

“The themes and social issues raised by Dickens are as relevant today as they were when the novel was published over 160 years ago. The central theme is the link between poverty and crime. Beyond that it explores the way society treats its weakest members.”

WHO: TNT Theatre Britain
WHAT: Oliver Twist
WHERE: Chenla Theatre, Phnom Penh Cultural Centre, Mao Tse Tung Blvd.
WHEN: 7pm May 6; 11am and 7pm May 7
WHY: Because you’ve got to pick a pocket or two, boys…

 

Of creativity and catharsis

A white pigeon flutters free, liberated from its cage by a girl with long raven hair. A small boy wearing a blue and yellow baseball cap waves his arms in delight as a butterfly beats its wings in the wind. A couple engage in a mock dog fight with a fleet of paper aeroplanes. Self-taught Indonesian painter Mohammad Toha Hasan, the man behind these rich, colour-saturated acrylic creations, is one of several artists whose work features in a silent art auction this week. Life Creative: The Meaning of Love is hosted by arts therapy organisation The Ragamuffin Project. Among the works on offer are watercolours by Australian Tony Smibert, whose “unusual approach to English watercolour actually grew out of the study of Japanese martial art”, and oils by Italian Guido Borelli, who counts among his collectors Jack Nicholson and former US president Jimmy Carter. To register for the auction, contact olek@nullragamuffinproject.org.

WHO: International artists
WHAT: Silent art auction
WHERE: Ragamuffin House, Street 12BT, Sangkat Boeung Tumpun, Khan Mean Chey
WHEN: 5pm March 30
WHY: Because creativity can be cathartic

 

Ancient no more

Nothing remains of the original texts which might have demystified the meanings and gestures of dance in the ancient temples of Ankgor. What is known about these elaborate rituals is that they were performed not for mere mortals, but as offerings to the gods. One seventh-century inscription, as reported by Boreth Ly on AsiaSociety.org, details in Sanskrit how dancers were ‘donated’ to temples by patrons and devotees. King Jayavarman VII was among the most generous, gifting thousands during his 37-year reign.

As part of the annual buong suong ceremony, it would fall to the monarch to ask the heavens for help on behalf of the nation. The plea was duly conveyed by classical dancers, who, legend has it, became possessed by divine spirits until the dance was complete. These highly stylised vehicles of worship, known in Khmer as robam kbech boraan, finally took their rightful place on Unesco’s world heritage list of intangible and oral treasures in November 2003. The journey had not been a smooth one.

Guggenheim Fellow Sophiline Cheam Shapiro, Cambodia’s most celebrated choreographer, was eight years old when in 1975 most performers went into hiding for fear they’d be executed by the Khmer Rouge. Almost overnight, the art of classical dance was reduced to a vessel for Maoist rhetoric. By 1981, when the School of Fine Arts finally reopened, only a handful of classical dancers had survived. Among the first 111 students to enrol was Sophiline.

In the years that immediately followed, classical dance was once more repurposed as a political tool. A tale about two gods fighting over a crystal ball, originally intended to demonstrate the difference between ignorance and enlightenment, was transformed by the state into one of communism versus capitalism (ironically, the lofty references to Leninism and Marxism were lost on most of the audience, who craved cultural stimulation after years of violence).

Today, this centuries-old dance form is evolving at an unprecedented rate courtesy of Sophiline and her husband John Shapiro, who co-founded Khmer Arts here in 2002. From an exotic Takhmao theatre originally built by Okhna Chheng Phon, minister of culture from 1982 to 1989 and one of the chief architects of the revival of the traditional Khmer arts, their professional dance troupe has become the first to usher classical dance into the 21st century.

On April 7, Khmer Arts will lift the lid on their revolutionary approach to ancient dance forms in a jungle extravaganza marking the organisation’s tenth anniversary and Cambodia’s New Year. The theatre’s setting is suitably dignified: five smiling Bayonesque faces watch performances unfold from the top of a towering Angkorian backdrop. The Advisor joined Khmer Arts during a recent rehearsal to talk hand gestures, gods, and time travel.

Sophiline: “People consider classical dance a symbol of cultural pride, because it’s such a unique art form to Cambodia, but war and poverty and the lack of outreach programmes – these make people think art is the least important. But culture is an element in our lives that identifies who we are. Classical dance plays that role.

“The way people sit, the way people pose, the way people offer greetings: these are all manifestations of classical dance in the simplest way. Look at social dances, the circle dance: the rhythm is kind of slow; the hand gestures resemble those of classical dance. To create work like ours – using the classical form but addressing contemporary issues – is also important. And the more people know about hand gestures and the meanings behind the dance, the more they can appreciate it.”

John: “If you come to it knowing nothing, all you can do is appreciate the surface aesthetic. For example, Sophiline was commissioned to create a piece for a Vienna festival based on Mozart’s The Magic Flute. She said: ‘I’m supposed to do something with this? What the hell is it?!’ Then she read a book about symbolism in the Magic Flute, a book about the history of the Freemasons (the Magic Flute is about Masonic beliefs), and a book about the last year of Mozart’s life, when he composed the piece. Through deciphering the opera, she was able to make a parallel between that and the Khmer Rouge – the dangers of extreme rhetoric and how that leaves no room for compassion and no room to change policy. She used Cambodian characters and mythology to express the dangers of using and adhering to extreme ideology. That’s the deciphering process.

“The only complaints we hear is that people are tired of seeing the same five to seven classical dances over and over and over again. Just as if you’re a ballet fan, you don’t want to see The Nutcracker or Swan Lake every week. What people say – and this is young and old – is that they’re very appreciative of seeing something new – and in classical dance, we’re the only ones doing this in Cambodia.”

Sophiline: “Seasons of Migration, which I choreographed in 2005, is the first piece, in my knowledge, to attempt to address a contemporary issue – and that issue is culture shock, including identity crisis. Culture shock is a modern concept, especially with people who migrate from place to place, but it can also apply to people who move from the countryside to the city, or back. People such as myself, who moved to the US and then came back.

“It’s a contemporary creation, but the form is classical. When I was at the School of Fine Arts in 1981, my teachers thought classical dance should look back to the past and excavate historic knowledge. We only choreographed new work that related to mythology, but not looking forward and dealing with contemporary issues. But this work is based on a concept coming out of everyday life.”

John: “Seasons of Migration is about gods and goddesses coming to Earth to live among humans and how they experience culture shock.”

Sophiline: “One of the goddesses is a serpent and she has problems with her tail. She doesn’t like it. She wants to tear it off.”

John: “That’s because none of the humans have tails, so she feels out of place.”

Sophiline: “That was our attempt to bring the classical form into the present time and make it relevant to us, to our lives, today.”

John: “Classical dance comes out of that ritual prayer tradition, so the oldest dances – with one or two exceptions – are really, really slow. They weren’t meant for an audience. Nobody was watching except the gods. If you watch them now, they can be a little boring because not much happens. They’re so slow and so balanced. It’s a different kind of beauty.”

Sophiline: “Most of the time they stay in one place. Cambodia is not the way it used to be after the Khmer Rouge, when the country was completely destroyed. Now, people have some sophistication, so the art has to match the level the audience demands. Even if the dance is simple, it has to be as sophisticated, as elegant, as it can be.

“Our work isn’t changing classical dance, it’s adding to it. It’s the beginning of a new path, a new form, being created. We’re using new music, different costumes, and experimenting with the way it looks. I call it robam boran chnnaiy – neo-classical, or contemporary classical, dance.”

John: “Another thing that’s new is that, typically, classical dance features gods and goddesses, kings, princess, giants, animals. It’s about mythology. But one of our pieces is a dance with a man and a woman, who could be anybody, even though the male part is played by a female dancer.

Sophiline: “Stained is a piece about the trial by fire in the Ramayana, but in this piece I give the female character a chance to speak, to question, because most of the time we see her as a very modest, ideal woman. She doesn’t talk much and there’s something inside her that’s not revealed, particularly intellectually. Stained is focusing on what she thinks, what she says, what she wants to know. Why do things happen like this? Is it fair? She questions her husband. Usually, the male character is the one who decides things.”

Four pieces will be performed during the evening (“Don’t forget your mosquito repellent,” cautions John). Ream Eyso & Moni Mekhala is an ancient fertility dance that describes the origin of rain and for centuries has been used in ceremonies at the height of the dry season, and Seasons of Migration explores the four stages of culture shock first described by anthropologist Kalvero Oberg. Munkul Lokey is performed to New York composer John Zorn’s lush musical setting of the Song of Songs, perhaps the world’s first erotic verse, and Stained is Sophiline’s interpretation of Neang Seda’s trial by fire from the Reamker epic.

WHO: Khmer Arts
WHAT: 10th anniversary contemporary classical dance performance
WHERE: Khmer Arts Theatre, Street 115, Takhmao
WHEN: 7pm April 7
WHY: Classical dance forms with 21st century edge

 

The melting away of all our yesterdays

In a conversation between curator Hannah Sender and Khmer artist Lorn Loeum, the artist emphasises the influence of Buddhism in the creation of his work. “Buddhism is not a philosophy: to me, it is a science,” he says. But in spite of Lorn’s assertion, the connection between his work and his belief is not immediately obvious in the work itself. One can come across it (as with Enlightenment) through a training of thought.

The series of images in Yesterday, No More establish the place of science within the overarching context of the temporary and unpredictable. This paradigm is achieved through a meeting of different artistic methods, including sculpture, painting and photography. Lorn carves into blocks of ice, seen carried from the markets daily in Phnom Penh, and filters paint through the grooves he creates. The result is a sense of experimentation with colour and form. He then photographs his creation and paints over parts of the image to draw out certain shapes and colours already emerging.

Lorn is not the first artist to use ice as a medium, but he is the first to treat it in such a way. The result is art which hovers on the border between abstract painting and landscape photography. What is special about these landscapes is that they are manmade and zoomed in to such an extent that we lose any surrounding environment or context. This is why the language Lorn uses to name his pieces is essential to our comprehension of it and our appreciation of his belief that Buddhism is a science.

The role of photography in Lorn’s work – to capture the moving paint as it travels through the carved ice – is in contradiction with Lorn’s choice of names for his works, and indeed for the whole series. The title Yesterday, No More establishes then negates the event of ‘Yesterday’. Contained within the three-word title is the contradiction which his work embodies. Not everything is destroyed by the ‘No More’, but ‘Yesterday’ becomes foundationless. What is left behind is faith: faith that ‘Yesterday’ refers to something in the past; now imperceptible, but indelible too.

Through the names of the pieces, Lorn indicates where science falters and belief reigns. When we look at these carved blocks of ice and dribbled paint, we are told to believe that we are witnessing unfolding beauty. We are told what we can see in the title, but we can only see its beginnings; the moment of emergence, not Beauty incarnate and obvious. Belief is the saviour of meaningfulness in Lorn’s work. We are not looking at nothing when we look at his work, but we must certainly invest some effort to see what Lorn tells us is framed in front of us.

The capacity of Lorn’s work for intellectual manoeuvering is staggering, but one needs to be told about Lorn’s beliefs before one begins to see what he wishes us to see. We are certainly not led by the hand by the artist, but contemplation will draw out the complexity of this work. Grab a coffee and sit in front of one of these paintings. You’ll be amazed at what you can get out of it.

WHO: Loeum Lorn
WHAT: Yesterday, No More
WHEN: Now until May 13
WHERE: Java Arts Cafe, Sothearos Blvd.
WHY: To see beauty, emerging