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Sbeik Thom at the Season of Cambodia Festival: Performing Memory after the Killing Fields in a Post-9/11 New York City1
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 February 2016
Abstract
During the period of the Khmer Rouge (1975–9) culture was turned back to ‘Year Zero’ through the murder and destruction of about 90 per cent of the country's artists and intellectuals. These art forms are now being remembered, revised and reinvented in order to articulate a contemporary Cambodian identity. In the spring of 2013, New York City hosted a month-long festival of Cambodian arts called the Season of Cambodia. The festival, which sought to celebrate and reaffirm Cambodian identity through the arts, set the stage for other post-conflict nations seeking renewal through artistic expression. A performance of sbeik thom, or large shadow puppets, was staged at the site of the former World Financial Center, seeking to create a dialogue between New York and Cambodia themed around healing and renewal.
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- Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 2016
Footnotes
1
I wish to express my gratitude for funding from the Mellon Innovating International Research, Teaching, and Collaboration Award programme under Offices of the Provost and the Vice Provost for Research, IU Bloomington, which made field research in New York and Cambodia possible. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Mid-America Theatre Conference in 2014 (winner of the Robert A. Schanke Theatre Research Award) and at the 2014 Khmer Studies Forum at Ohio University – I am grateful for the questions and comments given by audience members. Marion Gommard, communications manager for Cambodia Living Arts (CLA), provided valuable comments and assistance, as did other members of CLA, Amrita Performing Arts and Wat Bo. Any mistakes are my own. Finally, I wish to dedicate this paper to the young artists of Cambodia – I am inspired by their dedication and determination.
References
NOTES
2 Season of Cambodia, at www.seasonofcambodia.org/new-york-city-2013#nyc-highlights, accessed 28 August 2015.
3 Season of Cambodia Festival, ‘Press Release’, at http://brookfieldplaceny.com/churning, accessed 12 December 2013.
4 The large puppetry form of sbeik thom has several possible variations of spelling – sbek thom and sbeak thom are also common. Throughout this paper I follow the spelling preferred by the Season of Cambodia Festival, sbeik thom, unless I am quoting a source directly, in which case spelling follows the source.
5 The performers for sbeik thom have traditionally been male, because, as puppet master Mann Kosal explained, ‘the puppets were sacred objects, and it was forbidden for women to touch them’. Conversation with Mann Kosal, New York City, 26 April 2013. Today, there are several women studying and performing sbeik thom, but the puppeteers in the troupe from Wat Bo, the company I focus on in this article, are all still male. The only woman in the group is one of two narrators.
6 ‘About SOC’, at http://seasonofcambodia.org/about-soc/, accessed 22 August 2015.
7 ‘Season of Cambodia Festival Highlights’, http://seasonofcambodia.org/, accessed 27 January 2014.
8 Season of Cambodia, ‘Mission’, at www.seasonofcambodia.org/about#mission, accessed 22 September 2015.
9 Diamond, Catherine, Communities of Imagination (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2012), p. 124CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
10 Svay Sareth, artist statement on museum placard, Churning, 2013.
11 Rogers, Amanda, Performing Asian Transnationalisms: Theatre, Identity and Geographies of Performance (New York: Routledge, 2015), p. 8Google Scholar.
12 Season of Cambodia, at www.seasonofcambodia.org/new-york-city-2013#nyc-highlights, accessed 5 October 2015.
13 Season of Cambodia, Sor Neakabas programme for the performance.
14 I have had limited opportunity to study both Cambodian dance and sbeik thom through the Center for Khmer Studies and Sovanna Phum. I was struck by how similar many of the basic movements were. The puppet movement required a great deal of energy and concentration from the bottom of my feet that extended through the body. I call the puppeteers dancers because that is the only way to capture the type of movement and training required to perform sbeik thom. Indeed, many of the performers were also accomplished dancers.
15 Season of Cambodia, Sor Neakabas programme for the performance.
16 While in Cambodia I was able to watch several sbeik thom performances by the Sovanna Phum group. Each of these performances also contained the battle between White Monkey and Black Monkey and in these versions White Monkey would also clearly win.
17 Thompson, Ashley, ‘Forgetting to Remember, Again: On Curatorial Practice and Cambodian Art in the Wake of Genocide’, Diacritics, 41, 2 (2013), pp. 82–109CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here p. 83.
18 Kravel, Pech Tum and Thom, Sbek, Khmer Shadow Theater, English translation by Sos Kem (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Southeast Asia Program and UNESCO, 1995), pp. 20–1Google Scholar.
19 The Ramayana tells the tale of Rama and his brother Laksmana, who together with Hanuman the Monkey King must rescue Rama's wife Sita from the grasp of the evil Ogre Ravana. At the end Rama is able to rescue Sita, but their reunion is not a happy one as she must undergo much criticism from people of the court and undergoes several trials by fire in order to prove her chastity. Many Cambodian arts tell small parts of this much larger tale, which is a cultural staple and has variations around South and South East Asia.
20 The Reamker uses different names and varied spellings for the main characters in the Ramayana. In my account of the story and performance I use the names that were given in the programme for the festival.
21 Cravath, Paul, ‘The Ritual Origins of the Classical Dance Drama of Cambodia’, Asian Theatre Journal, 3, 2 (1986), pp. 179–203CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here p. 185.
22 Carlson, Marvin, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), pp. 54–6Google Scholar.
23 Hamera, Judith, ‘An Answerability of Memory: “Saving” Khmer Classical Dance’, TDR, 46, 4 (2002), pp. 65–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here p. 71.
24 Chandler, David, A History of Cambodia, 4th edn (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2008), p. 3Google Scholar.
25 Tuchman-Rosta, Celia ‘From Ritual Form to Tourist Attraction: Negotiating the Transformation of Classical Cambodian Dance in a Changing World’, Asian Theatre Journal, 31, 2 (2014), pp. 524–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar, traces the history of Cambodian dance and its many changes. Many of the basic assumptions regarding dance can be extended to sbeik thom.
26 Claire Knox, ‘Cambodian Art Takes Manhattan’, Phnom Penh Post, 3 May 2013, at www.phnompenhpost.com/7days/cambodian-art-takes-manhattan, accessed 17 September 2015.
27 Season of Cambodia, at www.seasonofcambodia.org/new-york-city-2013#nyc-highlights, accessed 5 October 2015.
28 Interview with the Venerable Pin Sem, from ‘Sbeak Thom Large Shadow Puppet, Part Two’, at www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFil9Ghq794, accessed 15 January 2014.
29 Ibid.
30 Author interview with Vann Sopheavuth, New York City, 26 April 2013.
31 Roach, Joseph, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), p. 218Google Scholar.
32 Hamera, ‘An Answerability of Memory’, pp. 75–6.
33 Author interview with Vann Sopheavuth, New York City, 26 April 2013.
34 For a richer introduction to the many ways Cambodian arts are being used in both Cambodia and the diaspora as agents of memory and revision see Ollier, Leakthina Chau-Pech and Winter, Tim, eds., Expressions of Cambodia: The Politics of Tradition, Identity, and Change (New York: Routledge, 2006)Google Scholar.
35 Thik Kaliyann, ‘Puppet Troupe Competing in Bangkok Festival’, Phnom Penh Post, 31 October 2014, at www.phnompenhpost.com/siem-reap-insider/puppet-troupe-competing-bangkok-festival, accessed 22 September 2015.