The Dancer and Cambodian History, cont.

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After the fall of that regime in 1979, surviving artists who made it back to the capital recruited children of dancers and musicians and started teaching—immediately. By 1980, Pen Sokhuon joined them and became a teacher at the newly reconstituted School of Fine Arts. Soon after her return to Phnom Penh, the Minister of Culture and Information asked her to perform for state visitors as Preah Ream, the central character in the Reamker, a role in which her teacher Sam Sakhorn had starred. Sokhuon was, by that time, a shell of her former self. She and her surviving colleagues had just emerged from the terror and desperation of the Khmer Rouge years. The professional artists who gathered to recreate the nation's rich artistic heritage estimated that between eighty and ninety percent of their peers (dancers, musicians, playwrights, poets, painters, sculptors, etc.) had perished under the harsh conditions imposed by the Khmer Rouge. All those who had survived had lost family members and friends; Sokhuon's husband and three children were among those who did not make it. In the face of such extensive loss and destruction as experienced in Cambodia, the country's dancers, immediately following the overthrow of the Khmer Rouge, endeavored to heal themselves and the nation by imparting vision and guidance, and by connecting people with a shared history and spirituality through what they knew best: the dance.

In preparation for that 1980 performance, Sokhuon lit incense and whispered prayers to the spirits and teachers of the dance, as is the custom prior to all performances. She sought their aid in remembering the intricate gestures of her role, and in recreating the controlled yet fluid movement required of her art. She was emaciated, and stiff. But her fingers maintained their flexibility—she was still able to curve them back into a crescent—because she had secretly massaged and bent her hands into dance positions when she found herself alone during her years of toil under the Khmer Rouge. Upon entering the stage for the first time in so long, "there before me appeared a vision of my teacher [Sam Sakhorn], leading me through every step, every choreographic pattern." Her teacher had perished in the Khmer Rouge's prison and torture center in the capital city, a fact Sokhuon would learn only later.

Dancers performing in the Pocheny Pavilion of the Royal Palace, Phnom Penh, Cambodia. From Raymond Cogniat, Danses d’Indochine, 1932.

Students at the University of Fine Arts dance program actually enter when they are about eight years old. (Dance studies continue from primary and secondary school through university.) Dancers practice stretching exercises and a series of basic gestures and movements (pictured here) each morning as class opens, moving on to three hours of technique specific to the role or character-type for which they have been selected. In the afternoons, they study academic subjects, following the national school curriculum. Photo by Toni Shapiro-Phim, 1992.

During the 1980s, Sokhuon and her colleagues painstakingly recreated as much of the repertoire as they could, piecing together their individual and collective embodied knowledge. Very few written, filmed, or photographic records of the dance survived the ravages of the Khmer Rouge years, and so many dancers and musicians with knowledge and skills had perished. They also trained a new generation of artists, graduating the first class in 1986. All of this was done against a backdrop of continued civil unrest as royalist, republican, and Khmer Rouge armies fought the new communist regime in control of the country following the ouster of the Khmer Rouge.