“Cambodian Stories” is the result of a lengthy collaboration between two renowned movement artists and students from the Reyum Art School in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Eiko and Koma, who have worked together since 1972, were first invited in 2004 to Cambodia by the Daravuth Ly. Ly, in partnership with the late Ingrid Muan, founded the Reyum Institute of the Arts and Culture in 1998 as means of maintaining and developing Cambodian arts of the past and present. The Reyum Art School acts as an alternative option for its students, who are trained in classical and modern styles and develop an artistic repertoire with real-world relevance.
The students, untrained in dance before Eiko and Koma arrived, have taken to the movement style of the choreographer-dancers wonderfully. The duo concentrates generously on movement and pace, turning a gesture or step into a singular action apart from time and the body. The effect is a slow, measured pace that may not reveal itself as dance right away. However, when Chakreya So makes her entrance onstage, arms outstretched and hands angled in a stylized pose, her unhurried steps imbue her with the same timeless presence found in the Hindu friezes of Angkor Wat, which have been cited as an inspiration for “Cambodian Stories.” For that reason, when the eight young men position themselves on a wooden scaffold on top of a canvas and feverishly paint her image, the scene translates into a sort of worship ritual. So, who is the youngest performer at age 16, is immortalized on the canvas in the time it takes for her to walk downstage and introduce herself to the audience. The men introduced themselves earlier – So’s separate introduction gives her an immediate distinction that is later supported by a growing, and promising, charisma.
“When I dance, I imagine I am walking on water,” she said. “Sometimes I am a flower.”
The young men hasten their brush strokes for a brief moment to make a few last touches here and there. As they lift the scaffold that supported them, and then the still-wet canvas, So’s likeness is revealed onstage. A naively sweet pop song by Cambodian singer Preap Sovat resonates through the piece, its chorus in English pleading, “Take me to your heart, take me to your soul.”
The dancers, including Eiko and Koma, all circle the larger than life portrait in the center of the stage. Moving both to the music and honoring their own timing and space, the dancers proffer a surprising innocence in their dance as they sing along quietly to the pop tune. The music in “Cambodian Stories” accents the choreography and themes throughout the piece. Under the direction of ethnomusicologist Sam-Ang Sam, PhD ’89, the blend of traditional and contemporary elements of dance and painting is complemented by the similarly fused music. The sounds of the dance contribute to its overall mood, whether it’s an ambient loop of cricket chirping or Sovat’s youthful crooning.
Because painting and dance are featured as equal parts of the performance, the times when they are reconciled are the most poignant part of “Cambodian Stories.” Instead of simple juxtaposition, the two art forms become harmonizing forces as the show unfolds. When So performs a solo onstage, the large portraits of various women that flank the stage sway back and forth, gently pushed by unseen hands that make them dance. In the other painting scene of the performance, So is seemingly mourned by Eiko and Koma while the young men paint on a dark canvas. Their painting is of her, again, but this time the she seems memorialized instead of idolized. On the canvas her likeness is that of the “Lady of the Lilies”, eponym of the exhibition at the Freeman Center for East Asian Studies.
“Cambodian Stories” trades parts of dancing and painting so as to create a performance that has the best parts of both; an image is given life through dance, while the ephemeral quality of the dance is in turn captured through the painting. When So eventually gets up and joins the painters in creating the image of the Lady of the Lilies, life is restored; instead of a portrait of death, it is the living portrait of a young woman faced towards a sky of finger-painted stars.
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