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Photo Copyright @ Mara Lavitt

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 headdresses. 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.

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