Let's Dance!

Many things in Cambodia seem temporary – the wooden houses, mud roads, not to mention shaky hospitals, they don’t really feel built to last. This, together with the country being effectively only 30 years old having been destroyed by the Khmer Rouge, can give the impression that there’s nothing longstanding here.

Of course some Khmer culture has survived, and it stretches back a very long way. (I find it useful to remind myself that London was still a poxy village when the Angkor empire stretched from Vietnam to Laos, Thailand to Burma). But apart from monuments such as Angkor Wat, this cultural heritage is not always easy to find. Granted, the beautiful script of the Khmer language goes back centuries, but there’s not much to be found where I’d normally look for cultural heritage - literature, arts or crafts, or even music.

But dance there is!

During my language training in the town of Kampong Cham we were lucky enough to visit a project which was training children in traditional dance – keeping alive the ancient art, and also more practically giving them a skill to secure their own future.

It was really beautiful – dressed in colourful silk costumes and accompanied by drums and flutes, the movements were amazingly graceful. There was much twirling of the writsts and bending-back of the ankles, done at improbable angles usually reserved for yoga teachers or wayward skiers.

It was fun too – the dances told stories of life in Cambodia, including love and war, but also more everyday activities looked fantastic when put to dance – my favourite was the planting of the rice crop, a flurry of whirling and dipping. I also loved the monkey dance, mainly as the masked boys aping around were clearly having so much fun.

This kind of dance is called ‘Apsara’, which I understand means ‘angel’. There are bas-relief carvings of Apsaras at Angkor, and King Jararvanman is said to have had 4,000 dancers at his royal court. Watching the performance, it struck me that there are interesting comparisons between the conventions of the dance and those of Cambodian society today – particularly the controlled emotions, fixed expressions, grace, deference and lack of physical contact.

The dancing during Chinese New Year also has a long heritage, with Chinese culture still enjoying a strong influence in Cambodia. I watched several troupes surrounding elablorately costumed tigers (played by two dancers, front and back, like a pantomime donkey but rather more graceful). The general theme seemed to be to prance around to cymbals and drums until somone let off a load of firecrackers - great fun!

My personal experiences of dancing in Cambodia have been limited, and not always very Apsara-like. I have also ‘gone out dancing’ to a few clubs here, the most notorious being Heart of Darkness in Phnom Penh. Once associated with drugs and gangsters, it’s now fairly tame, apart from the heavy dancy beats – my Flashdance routine was wasted on them. The floating Pontoon venue was more fun, and a Cambodian club in Siem Reap club even played us some western boogy music before moving on to their karaoke and sexy dance competition. Of course Phnom Penh also hosts the famous Blue Chilli club, complete with lip-syncing trannies gyrating along the bar - it is performed with great gusto, but Apsara it is not.

The main place to see dance in today’s Cambodia is at weddings, and the post-meal dancing, sometimes to a live band, does have similarities to the Apsara, with the twirling hands, graceful movements and modesty in avoiding physical contact. The nearest you can get to a clinch is an almost motionless waltz-like slow dance – I can’t say my attempt was particularly romantic, but then it was with a rather plump old Khmer gentleman.

Dance in Cambodia has been much more widespread and varied than I had imagined, and with so much seeming to be impermanent here, it does seem to provide interesting links to the country’s past. Are you ready for Strictly Apsara?