Her Royal Highness, the Princess Bopha Devi, was Minister of Culture during the time of Mark Sadan’s visit to Cambodia, and she is patron of the Royal Cambodian National Dance Company, with whom she danced when she was a young woman. During the Princess’s youth, the company rehearsed and performed inside the palace walls for very select audiences, but today, the company performs for the public in Cambodia and throughout the world. The company is located and rehearses at the Royal University of Fine Arts as part of an extensive dance training program there. Regardless of setting, the dancers still learn the traditional Cambodian dances based on episodes from the great Indian epic poems, the Ramayana (Cambodian: Reamker) and the Mahabharata, and from their indigenous Hindu-Buddhist-Khmer mythology.
From the beginning of their training as small children, the dancers learn from the physical memory housed within their teachers’ bodies. The teachers are all former dancers, and they teach the roles they once performed. Proeung Chhieng, the Vice Rector of the Royal University of Fine Arts and director of the Cambodian National Dance Company, is the men’s primary instructor. He was a reknowned performer of the role of Hanumon, the White Monkey, and today he teaches this role. The women, all former performers with the Royal Ballet teach the young woman by demonstration and by physical contact. They mold the young women’s bodies into the correct positions, moving fluidly behind them until they feel the proper rhythm and flow. At an advanced stage, the students partner each other, the older girls often teaching and guiding the younger girls forms. Often, two teachers work simultaneously with one student, one teacher correcting the head, shoulders and hips from behind, the other directing the arms and hands from the front. The hands and fingers are essential. They curlicue, bend, point, come together, part. Each movement and each position is precise and at once delicate and certain.
Far away from the Royal University and the Palace, a small, regional, Classical Cambodian dance company in the bustling town of Siem Reap practices the same ritual dances as the National Dance Company in Phnom Pen. While the National Company does not perform often due to a lack of a permanent performance space, the Siem Reap Ballet performs nearly every night at a restaurant called the Bayon II. The dancers are directed by Madame Boyan Kim, who herself once danced with the National Company. In both companies one will find older women, many of whom were former dancers, sewing the dancers into their elaborate, buttonless costumes before each performance and assisting and supervising the placement of the flowers and golden bracelets. Like the dancers in the National Company, the members of the Siem Reap Ballet begin their practice each day with meditation, and the choreography itself which is sacred. The lessons emphasize synchronicity and teach that no individual should stand out as virtuosic or more prominent than another. The dance is a beautiful tapestry; each dancer is her own golden thread. With the Siem Reap company also called ‘The Royal Ballet’ classical dance is presented as part of an evening show at Bayon II it retains its ritual essence.
In June 2003, photographer Mark Sadan visited Cambodia for four weeks. He worked with the National Dance Company, with the Siem Reap Ballet, and with a children’s dance company which is part of an extensive educational and aid program for street children and orphans directed by Madame Yim Sokhary .The teachers and costumes made possible through Princess Bopha Devi’s direct assistance. Teachers from the Royal University work these children who then perform for the public throughout the country.
While in Cambodia Sadan photographed the National Dance Company within the palace grounds with special permission from Her Royal Highness Bopha Devi, and the Siem Reap Royal Ballet at an ancient Buddhist temple site whose stones and architectural structures dated back to the time of Angkor Wat’s glory. Sadan’s images depict the dancers in preparatory meditation, in lessons and rehearsals, getting ready for performances and actually performing on stage and in carefully chosen locations.
By photographing the members of the National Dance Company not only in their rehearsals at the University of Fine Arts, but in various restricted locations around the palace grounds, Sadan’s images place the jewels that are the dancers back in the setting to which they belong. The gold of their crowns reflects the gold of the palace roofs and the golden sunlight that falls upon them. The dancers today embody the culture, the spirit, the hope of the future; they are Cambodia’s living connection to the past. In a country shadowed by recent sorrows, the golden light of dance is shining.
Emma Stein has been dancing professionally since 1999. She has performed with the Buglisi/Foreman Dance Company, Pearl Lang Dance Theater, and Sens Production, among others. Ms. Stein graduated from Columbia University with a Bachelor of Arts in Art History in May 2003, and her studies included intense investigation of South and Southeast Asian art, dance, religion, and their infinite points of intersection. She is currently a Guest Curator at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York City, where she is creating an exhibit of representations of the female divine in world art, which will open in October 2004.