Dancing in Cambodia

Dancing in Cambodia

I loved the first essay in Dancing in Cambodia, At Large in Burma by Amitav Ghosh. The book contains three fine essays, the two of the title and another titled Stories in Stones about Angkor Wat.

Dancing in Cambodia begins ‘On 10 May 1906, at two in the afternoon, a French liner called the Admiral-Kersaint set sail from Saigon carrying a troupe of nearly a hundred classical dancers and musicians from the royal palace at Phnom Penh. They were to stage the first ever performance of Cambodian classical dance in Europe, at the Exposition Coloniale in Marseille.’

The story zig-zags between 1906 and 1993. In 1906, the beautiful dancers in their colourful sampots and the royal family won the hearts of the French, including Rodin who followed the troupe and gained permission to sketch the dancers. The book contains four of his lovely sketches. Ghosh visits Cambodia in 1993, and encounters the dancer Chea Samy, a survivor of the dark days who had entered the palace as a child of six.

The story ends with the first performance of classical dance after the Pol Pot years. The city was in shambles. Dancers wore cheap costumes, no brocades, and silks, and splendour. People flocked in and when the dancers came on stage, the audience began sobbing. Ghosh closes: ‘it was a kind of rebirth: a moment when the grief of survival became indistinguishable from the joy of living.’ (March, 2013).