August 2001

In the June 23rd New York Times, journalist Seth Mydans reported that the grave of Pol Pot had become a place of veneration. Not only veterans of the Khmer Rouge army whom he led to victory and domination over their country between 1975 and 1979 come to pray for a winning lottery number or a cure for malaria at this patch of dangerous mountain jungle on the Thailand-Cambodian border. The less implicated also leave their offerings by the still blackened spot where one of the monsters of a monster-haunted century was cremated three years ago, not far from the hut where he died, some say murdered by his own followers. Aren’t these pilgrims also among the victims of this murderer of over a million of his own people? Don’t they also struggle to survive in the country he so completely ruined that even now, a quarter century later, it still limps toward recovery?

The unimaginable horror of the Pol Pot period, which includes 18 years of guerrilla warfare after his rule was ended by a Vietnamese invasion, has never received an adequate accounting in historical records and certainly never through the clarification and release war crimes trials might provide. Cambodians have been left in the midst of their own confusion over how such a powerful, charismatic leader who proclaimed himself his people’s savior and liberator could be responsible for such evil. As Mydans observes, they are "free to reinvent their past in an attempt to ease the pain." Therefore, the shrine to the monster in the jungle.

To gain some vantage above the clouds of black irony that swirl about this circumstance, perhaps one might view it as indicative of some fundamental process of healing in order to go forward: a process of myth making. What link might there be, for example, between the creation of the legend of Pol Pot and the one, now lost in time, that comes down to us as the story of the House of Atreus or the House of David? Such stories encompass crime, guilt, trauma, death, and ultimately purgation, reconcilement and a path leading into the future. Is a story such as Pol Pot’s so overwhelming that it must be told, regardless of how the forces of circumstance distort the very act of telling, in order to overcome the spiritual paralysis it has inflicted? What is the relationship between history, memory, narrative and the very fact of survival? And, of course, of all these to art?

These have been the concerns of Ong Keng Sen who, as artistic director of the Singapore-based company TheatreWorks, founded the Flying Circus Project in 1994, an intercultural, multimedia workshop to explore the encounter between traditional performance arts and the contemporary world. His internationally known productions have tended to be large and ambitious, such as the recent Desdemona, which began with Shakespeare’s story, then was adapted by a Japanese playwright, elaborated by Korean musicians, Indian dancer-actors, a Burmese traditional puppeteer, two video artists (Singapore and Korea), and a U.S. lighting designer, culminating in a work that confronted, among other things, sexual and colonial domination.

Until he came to Cambodia, however, had he ever encountered the forces fundamental to his concerns at such an elemental level? There, as he put it in an interview this past June at the International Festival of Arts and Ideas in New Haven, Connecticut, he met myth before it had become myth, art before it had become art.

He had come to Cambodia in September 2000 in hopes of finding traditional artists to bring to Singapore and participate in the Flying Circus. There he met the 68-year-old Em Theay, a principal classical dancer and singer who had survived Pol Pot. She is among those called "tenth dancers": for each one who lived, nine others didn’t. Three of her sisters, all dancers, perished, along with four of her eight children, a granddaughter and a son-in-law. She is now a kru, a master teacher (cf. the Indian guru), imparting her art to a generation largely cut off from a tradition, aspects of which reach back 1700 years. Keng Sen already had an idea to do a characteristically large piece, incorporating the lives and works of six or seven such elder artists from different parts of Asia. When Cynthia Hedstrom, Program Director of the New Haven festival, expressed interest in his Cambodian encounter, an idea began to take shape.

Surprisingly, doubt and opposition were strongest among those who had come to Cambodia to help relieve its devastated population, such as workers in the numerous non-governmental organizations who have been in the country for years now. Keng Sen is famous as an "avant-garde" director, who throws artists from different backgrounds together in freely experimental ways that he calls "cultural negotiation." To bring performers like Em Theay into situations in which they would have to interact with others from less fragile and more up-to-date backgrounds, confronting the disaster of their personal histories would throw out of balance their hard-won equilibrium. They had not experienced the horror as artists but as human beings. How could they be expected to exploit it as material for someone else’s esthetics? This effort to protect some of the 20th century’s most damaged victims was understandable and discouraging.

Nonetheless, four Cambodians came to work at the Flying Circus laboratory, including the dancer Kim Bun Thom and the puppet master Mann Kosal. Keng Sen found them eager and fully able to participate, to improvise within their own disciplines, and to open up their lives to other artists as they all engaged with the complex world around them. Encouraged, the director returned to Cambodia in January 2001 and met with Em Theay and her oldest daughter, Thong Kim Ann, also a dancer who had taken over many of her mother’s roles. They talked for a week, six hours a day, discussing the implications of telling the story of their lives in public. "I wanted to feel that we could be on as equal a plane as possible," recalls the director. "I didn’t want to come in to `buy’ their stories. I constantly asked how could we present this material with the kind of sensitivity that would allow the project to be part of a healing process."

Em Theay gave her blessing. There would be two exploratory workshops in February and in May. Participating would be the kru and her daughter, Flying Circus participants Bun Thom and Mann, Cambodian translator Sotho Kulikar, Singaporean videographer and performer Noorlinah Mohamed, TheatreWorks producer Tay Tong, and Keng Sen.

The temple city of Angkor was chosen for the first workshop. Keng Sen did not want to remove the artists from their culture, but he did want to take them away from their homes in Phnom Penh. Not only was there the practical consideration of creating a focused, protective environment unbothered by everyday distractions, there was also a symbolic aspect to the separation. Pol Pot’s first action when he came to power in 1975 was to empty out the capital city. At the time it seemed somehow a reasonable if extreme strategy to cleanse the country of the unbridled corruption associated with overthrown dictator, Lon Nol. The Khmer Rouge announced that the evacuation would be for only three days. Who could imagine that few of the city’s citizens would see their home again for at least four years, and tens of thousands--particularly artists, intellectuals and professional people--would never return?

Obviously, the singling out of one group is no more defensible than of another, but why the vendetta against the artists, most particularly the dancers? When he saw their predecessors perform in Paris in 1908, the sculptor Rodin wrote, "It is impossible to see human nature brought to a higher state of perfection . . . We have only them and the Greeks . . ." Ironically, the European adoration of Cambodian culture played some role Pol Pot’s death sentence. During their rule from the mid-19th century to 1940, the French contributed considerably toward preserving lakon krabach boran, as the "dance of the palace ladies" is called, although they separated it from royal control, cultivated it in the salons of colonial aficionados, and allowed foreign elements to permeate it, particularly from Thailand. When Norodom Sihanouk was crowned king in 1941, he and particularly his mother, Kossamak, sought to purify the form even as they modernized it. During the 1960s, his daughter, Bopa Devi, presided as principal dancer over a 254-member troupe, once more under the jurisdiction of the palace, but there were other companies as well. In Cambodia, who controlled the dance controlled the nation. Pol Pot wanted to destroy that historical link to power.

In her efforts to retrieve authentic Cambodian classical dance, Queen Mother Kossamak sought visual models in the thousand-year-old sculpture of Angkor. It was she who caught sight of the seven-year-old Em Theay from a palace window as the child practiced in the royal training space; she decreed that the student learn the dances of the giant (the other three traditional roles are prince, princess, and monkey). The girl performed before the king in Angkor and he wrote a song especially for her. The workshop began there, in a pagoda provided by the Center for Khmer Studies.

As Keng Sen describes the process, "During the two workshops, we would all sit on the floor and talk with someone translating. We recorded everything--over 100 hours of material. Sometime Em Theay would dance as she was talking, reenact some of the life in the palace or the rigorous training. You can see scenes in the performance that give a sense of what the rehearsals were like.

"After the conversations, I would distill what was said to several points. I would come back to rehearsals with the points and ask what they thought about them. The process of evaluation was very important. They may have told us something privately, but not want to share it with 200 people. The process of evalutation was very important.

"At first, we would have to stop our sessions because we all would become overwhelmed, but the process of healing became evident. After ten days in Angkor, the stories became about their return to Phnom Penh. They had become visibly more confident, almost triumphant. They had allowed their wounds to open and had accomplished the first stage of some kind of recovery."

"Upon our return in May, it became evident that the various physical sites were very powerful because of the memories each would bring up. In Phnom Penh, we went to the old palace where Em Theay began her career and to Tuol Sleng, the Khmer Rouge’s detention and torture center which is now a museum. The walls there are covered with pictures of their victims, some of whom our artists knew. I found that the people do not consider it or the Killing Fields, which is just open space now, memorials for what happened--memorials meant for them, that is. They feel they have been appropriated by the present political powers to secure their positions by blaming everything that’s wrong now on Pol Pot. Our artists said that many locals have not been to those places. `Too many ghosts,’ they said."

"When Pol Pot emptied Phnom Penh, the people were sent to labor camps in the country, mainly to clear forests for farming. Life was extremely nomadic. They generally did not live in a particular village but moved around to locations they cannot recognize now. Of our four performers, two cannot trace exactly where they were during those four years. They can’t go back to find the bones of family and friends who died there. At the time, they weren’t even allowed to bury their dead. There is a complete erasure of the past."

"Em Theay and her daughter were luckier because they were based in a particular village in Battambang Province. At the beginning of the rehearsal process in February, I had suggested that maybe we could return to that village. At that time, they said they would rather not unless it was really essential. In May I was amazed that both Em Theay and Thong Kim Ann had become completely insistent. It was like they were leading us to the village. They were anxious finally to tell the story. As with the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the village farmers were put in charge of the laborers. There had been a total inversion in the power structure. When we went back, those farming families were still there. They were also victims of Pol Pot, of course, but at the same time they had been placed in disciplinarian positions. Our company met the farmers who had been in charge of their lives twenty years before and there were tears of reconciliation. Em Theay showed us where people were killed and where there are mass graves. She survived precisely because of her dancing and singing. She was useful entertaining the children while the rest worked. They all had an urgency to tell us those stories and now they have the urgency to tell an audience."

But what audience and using what form? Those questions impinge upon the most basic assumptions about making a performance, the roles of those who make it, and what it means to see it. At the festival in New Haven, audience members were given a printed translation of what was being said on stage. According to a program note, this libretto was "in keeping with the documentary aspects of this production," allowing "the audience the choice of focusing on the performers and choosing to read the script at an appropriate moment. Instead of chasing the surtitles, the audience member can concentrate on the musicality of a different language, the atmosphere around the performers and the shifts of emotions in their faces."

Providing the script was reasonable solution to a practical problem, but it brings up troubling esthetic concerns immediately, automatically: appreciating the musicality of the language somehow separately from what is being said; savoring the shifting emotions of the performers aside from the cause of those emotions; even viewing these participants as performers at all. Thong Kim Ann’s young daughter died in the labor camp because of the stress of life there. Here is the rest of the story as told by her and reproduced in the script:

When my daughter died, my husband was 20 kilometers away working in another labor camp. When he finally came back on home leave, he was very shocked to hear about his daughter. He did not want to live anymore. I wanted to go to ask the chief of my labor camp to allow my husband to stay with me and to work in the corn fields. My husband agreed to do so for me. I begged the chief to allow my husband to stay. He said nothing for a long time, then he summoned somebody. Suddenly two soldiers came and tied my husband’s elbows behind his back. I cried, `I have made a big mistake by saying this. I should be more faithful to the Aung Kah [Khmer Rouge]. Please allow my husband to go back to where he was.’ They took my husband away to prison. From that moment until now I have never seen my husband again.

"In asking them to tell these stories, I would become their judge," said Keng Seng. "Thong Kim Ann would ask me if I thought she was guilty of killing her husband. Because I had asked them to tell the stories, they saw me as some kind of authority figure. I had conceived this project and got them together. I had to be responsible in a way that directors don’t have to be." It must be added that he was called upon to adjudicate where there has been no legal process of adjudication, no public closure on guilt. Nor is he a therapist in a culture where there have been no medical avenues for individual healing. Personal reaction to the atrocities has often been shame, which becomes a way of dealing with the past.

Other questions arose after the project was shown to audiences for the first time in New Haven: "There were new tears. Em Theay herself is much more meditative. Now seventy, she seems to feel that this is a part of her history. The younger ones feel very strongly that their lives have been set back, destroyed, robbed. I spoke to them afterwards--and this is one of the tensions of being a director in these very unusual circumstances. With actors, I would have said, `Okay guys, you’re crying too much. You’re alienating the audience. You have to control yourselves, because control leads to power.’ But I can’t tell these people that. I can’t tell them how I think their story should be told. Last night, I told them that I would like the audience to believe that they are brave people, not overwhelmingly victims of the past.

"There is a very difficult catch-22 in a country like Cambodia which has so much dependency on the foreign donations that come through aid organizations. There is a victim mentality. They have to play that role in order to get some of the dole-outs. This is prevalent in some areas of the country, but Cambodians are very resilient, very brave people. So, I said to them last night that they are moving into a time when their tears need to be shed for other reasons. They must no longer be just tears of sorrow. What happens after sorrow?" The piece is entitled The Continuum: Beyond the Killing Fields.

It’s a simple presentation, much of it clearly derived from the basic work in Cambodia: the participants gather, tell their stories, naturally expand their telling into dance and song. Those segments are punctuated by Noorlinah Mohamed’s video work, which takes us directly to the places we hear about the labor camp village, the Tuol Sleng museum and its archive of the dead. Sometimes the sequences have documentary directness, sometimes they conjure, as when masses of black beetles swarm out of eroded walls after a rainstorm. What we see is supported by the soundscape of Japanese composer Yen Chang, who provides a setting, mostly his own voice electronically altered, for everything but the dance. That happens in silence.

It also happens in rehearsal clothes, except for the purple sash Em Theay wears to indicate her royal patronage. At first, she had balked at the idea. It wasn’t the classical dance without the rich gold costumes and elaborate head dresses. But after a few weeks, she began to get the sense of it. She saw they were constantly moving in and out of personal stories. Even the dances lakron krabach boran were being performed as personal stories. She would just get up and remember her favorite sequence. That’s how she chose to enact it. For Keng Sen, as an outsider, that was very impressive: the ability to slip in and out of joy and sorrow in a way that is almost impossible to understand: "They’ll be laughing one minute and the next they’ll be back in a moment when the tears come."

In one of the emblematic passages that seems to confirm the title, we watch as Em Theay, Thong Kim Ann and Kim un Thom teach Noorlinah Mohamed their art. Just as with their students in Phnom Penh, they guide her body for her into the proper positions, gently but firmly in spite of the evident pain. The knowledge is passed, even beyond the borders of geography and history--a continuum. If the traditional forms were somehow retrieved perfectly, their performance now would have an unavoidable museum quality. Only by moving the art through its attempted destruction on to a broader stage will it not only survive but revive.

Such revival is manifest in the work of the traditional puppeteer, Mann Kosal he practices the art of nang shek.. Cambodian puppets are not like the smaller, articulated images familiar to us from Java or Bali. They are 4 1/2 foot panels in which individuals seem to bring their scenery with them. Until now, they have only represented characters from the Ramayana but Mann has created Khmer Rouge soldiers and other contemporary figures. A video highlight shows him choosing a cowhide, curing the leathers and carving out one of his creations. It will take its place along side those from the ancient epic.

Continuum demands an approach that sets it apart from even the most experimental artistic production. Its aesthetic comes from trying to be involved with the people rather than with the form. Keng Sen considers the process his group of artists are still discovering one of healing, but also one of myth making, which brings us back, not only to the new traditional puppets and the personal stories that are classical dances, but also to that shrine to Pol Pot. Part of the company’s original exploration involved actually trying to summon up the monster. Keep in mind that the giant roles belonged to Em Theay, and her daughter, as well as to Kim Bun Thom: "I asked them as an experiment to wear the mask of the monster as Pol Pot--to be Pol Pot. They actually wrote speeches as Pol Pot. That’s not in the performance, but I felt it was an important stage in the process. I would like to come back to that, because I feel that one of the final stages of coming to terms with that time is to put themselves into the antagonist’s place. I also had the idea of a three-year process in a Cambodian university, working with a writer to translate Em Theay’s story as a traditional opera and in that way retrieve that form as well."

Continuum will be presented in Singapore and there are invitations from Australia, Denmark and Germany with others expected. The main effort is to find funding to bring it to Cambodia, but not to Tuol Sleng or a place like it: "If we want to make a presentation about the healing process of the Cambodian people, we have to find a place that is accessible to them." Any presentation at all would face opposition--a lot of people who want to move on and would be angry with them for digging the past up. The pressure now is intense to become part of the new global economic movement and to turn away from the disastrous past as Angkor becomes a prominent tourist destination. When the company went back to the labor camp village they found young kids who didn’t believe mass graves were there. They thought that their parents and grandparents were just "spinning a myth."
But there are reasons to hope--new ones. When they went to the labor camp, the villagers told them that a few weeks before somebody else had come there in search of his mother’s bones. He was from Phnom Penh and had come by himself-- perhaps, now that life is more stable, a sign of rising private interest in trying to come to terms.

And just this week (July 24) Seth Mydans reports in the The New York Times that "the (Cambodian) Senate unanimously approved a law that would allow creation of an international tribunal to try surviving leaders of the Khmer Rouge, the Communist movement responsible for the deaths of more than a million people from 1975 to 1979. The law needs final approval by the Constitutional Council and King Norodom Sihanouk." Upon review and approval by the United Nations, a trial could then begin.

" I hope that, when we perform Continuum in Cambodia, other people will begin to do things like it and start to think about their personal lives as inspiration for a new mythology," reflected Keng Sen. "Maybe ours is a project that will exhaust itself. These four people may one day not feel it necessary to do this anymore. That is actually what I think about most and what I hope will come. That’s very unusual, because as an artist you’re always thinking that you want to prolong the life of a work. But here I’m hoping that one day it will just not be necessary any more."