Setting the scene: New York and Cambodia

The stated purpose of the festival was to revise history and identity through the arts, and organizers saw New York City as integral to that premise. According to Phloeun Prim, the executive director for Season of Cambodia,

Reinvigorating a modern Khmer identity through the arts has required international aid and support, and the festival received international sponsorship from businesses, individuals and NGOs. The festival's main sponsor was Cambodia Living Arts, a not-for-profit organization with offices in Phnom Penh and the United States. Their primary mission is ‘to illuminate and advance Cambodian arts and culture, driving international support and attention to creativity and diversity of cultural expressions in Cambodia today’.Footnote ⁸ Writing in a more sceptical vein, Catherine Diamond has argued that in Cambodia ‘many performers tend to see foreign support as their only hope’.Footnote ⁹ Either way, transnational formations have been key to the work of renewal through the arts for Cambodia, and this dynamic was on display in the siting of the sbeik thom performance, which was geared towards celebrating tradition and renewal, nature and urban development.

Brookfield Place was still under development on the day of the performance; there were signs of construction and few shops were open. The Winter Garden Atrium, where the performance took place, is a large indoor courtyard with benches, palm trees and potted plants hanging from the high ceiling. Behind the stage is a wall of windows that look out onto a busy park, the river and the Brooklyn skyline. A site-specific mural, Churning, by Cambodian artist Svay Sareth, covered an outside wall that was visible from inside the performance space. The mural shows a popular park, located near the palace along the river in Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia. A monument honouring the period of Vietnamese and Cambodian friendship after the Khmer Rouge is in the centre of the park in Phnom Penh. The monument has stirred controversy because of a long history of conflict between Vietnam and Cambodia. In Sareth's mural the monument is covered by a rendition of ‘Churning of the Sea of Milk’ – a massive bas-relief carving from Angkor Wat. The original carving shows the god Vishnu urging demons and angels to work together to create an elixir of immortality. In Sareth's mural heavenly creatures are wearing army fatigues, suggesting that opposing forces might be able to truly come together in friendship. In his artist's statement, Sareth wrote, ‘Replacing one monument with another draws attention to their similarities; two sides, in tension, attempting cooperation. While Churning’s tug-of-war references Cambodia's past and present, its coded yet succinct critique on conflict and power struggle is universal’.Footnote ¹⁰

Taken together, the mural, the trees and plants and the architecture indexed Cambodia and New York against each other in ways that sought to generate a complex interplay of memory and meaning for the audience and performers. The audience was at once watching the performance and watching the city – the wall of glass behind the screen looked out onto a terrace featuring shops, restaurants and social activity – creating two narratives of revision side by side (Fig. 1). Straw mats were laid out on the floor in front of the stage to invite the audience to watch the show according to convention. Watching Cambodian artists and the city established the basis of a collective experience between New Yorkers and Cambodians framed around renewal. Here, the transnational dimension of Cambodian arts production found an apt location. As Amanda Rogers puts it, transnational formations are a ‘form of situated practice through which cross-border activity and imagination are used to remake everyday worlds’.Footnote ¹¹ During the performance some people moved around to get a different view, children played or danced to the music, some people sat quietly watching, and others standing outside watching through the windows came in to get closer to the action. Smells from the restaurants and food trucks around the plaza wafted by as people brought snacks and meals closer to the performance space.

Fig. 1.

The audience watches the performance of Sor Neakabas in Brookfield Place. Photo by Darial Seed, used with permission.

Opening: rituals, good and evil

Sbeik thom joins the Khmer people with ritual, myth and history through physical objects, music and dance. Each individual puppet depicts a particular character or scene from the Reamker, or Cambodian Ramayana. The emphasis of a sbeik thom performance is not on creating lifelike movement; rather the dancer and puppet join together to create a spectacle that supports the narrated and sung story. Sbeik thom (Fig. 2) translates as ‘large’ (thom) puppet or ‘skin’ (sbeik) – the ornate puppets average four to six feet in height. Made out of cowhide, the two-dimensional, reddish-brown puppets are non-articulated. One or two wooden sticks are attached to the puppet and these are used to manipulate, or dance, the puppet against the screen. A traditional Khmer orchestra (krom phleng pin peat) accompanies the performance and one or two narrators describe the action and give voice to the characters. The screen, made of cotton or muslin, is about ten feet in height and twenty or more feet in length. Historically a large bonfire was built behind the screen in order to give light to the performance and cast the shadows of the puppets and dancers upon the screen, although performances now use bright electric light.

Fig. 2.

The sbeik thom are large puppets held aloft by a dancer. Photo by: J. Goodlander.

Publicity for the SOC categorized its sbeik thom performance as ‘theatre and ritual’.Footnote ¹² Historically, sbeik thom functioned within Khmer ritual and was performed at court in the king's palace. At Brookfield Place, the aesthetics, structure and content of the performance were designed to create a social experience of ritual that might bring the audience together in an experience of healing. In the glass-enclosed pavilion of the Winter Garden Atrium sat a stage with a large screen erected on it. An LCD projector was located behind the screen to cast the moving image of a flickering fire – allowing the shadows of the dancers together with the puppets, each held aloft, to become visible for the audience. In front of the screen, stage left, on a raised platform, sat five musicians with a variety of drums, gongs and other traditional Khmer instruments. Two narrators, one male and one female, stood stage right, next to the screen, in order to describe the action and to give voice to the characters. Above the top of the large screen, English surtitles were projected to provide translation of words and story. A traditional form and digital technology were therefore configured together to offer an accessible ritual experience to the audience.

The performance began with a ritual ceremony called sampeah kru to connect private space with public and Cambodian space in New York City. About twenty minutes before the public performance the members of the troupe joined together in offerings and prayer in order to honor their teachers and hope for a successful performance. This ceremony called upon the invisible spirits, past teachers, the gods and the physical world of the past and present to offer thanks and ask for protection during the performance. The simplicity of the first ceremony, done in private in a small room, contrasted with one then performed onstage for the audience gathered to watch the puppet show, which, as the programme described it, was to ‘request guidance, good luck, and strength from their deceased masters’.Footnote ¹³ These invocations conventionally unite performers and audience together in a cleansing from evil. Here, the ritual invited the past, remembered and reconstructed in the bodies of the performers and the space of the performance, to join together with the present in an act of creation.

Sva Prachap, a short scene dramatizing a battle between White Monkey and Black Monkey and symbolizing the battle between good and evil, is performed after the opening ritual. This battle bridges the world of ritual and the world of the story, dramatizing the healing aspects of ceremony. The shadows of two dancers, each holding aloft a giant puppet, appeared on the screen. This troupe, from the Wat Bo pagoda in Siem Reap, near Angkor, uses a white screen with a black border about four feet tall extending to the ground. The black screen often obscured the bodies of the dancers; the upper body and sometimes only the hands holding the puppets were visible. (Some sbeik thom troupes avoid using this border, since it visually disassociates the human from the puppet.) The dancers made large sweeping motions with their entire bodies to animate the puppets. For fighting, the puppets turned in a spinning motion and each would strike the top of the other. Sometimes the dancers would come around to the front of the screen, allowing the audience to view the intricate and energetic movements required to move the puppet with nuanced feeling upon the screen.Footnote ¹⁴ The battle between White Monkey and Black Monkey continued without either emerging as a clear victor. Finally, the monkeys asked a wise hermit to give final judgment, and the hermit ruled that White Monkey was in the right and thus, as the programme explained, ‘good triumphs over evil’.Footnote ¹⁵ The moment of judgment only took a moment. The main story of the performance had not yet begun, and already the audience was reassured that everything would be fine in the end; the past evils that reside in bodies and places would be defeated.Footnote ¹⁶

The specific pasts that inhabited the bodies and venue of the SOC performance were called forth through artistry and adaption, rather than direct reference. No mention was made of the Khmer Rouge or the killing fields – this absence has been observed in other Cambodian arts and culture, but this version of Sva Prachap demonstrated a shift in values.Footnote ¹⁷ Pech Tum Kravel, former minister of culture and the fine arts in Cambodia and a noted historian of sbeik thom, gives a summary of how the story was told before the Khmer Rouge. In Kravel's version, after White Monkey captures Black Monkey he goes to his teacher, Preah Muni Eysi, for final judgment:

Kravel's version of the story resonates with aspects of a South East Asian cosmology that favour balance between positive and negative forces. Perhaps, however, in the aftermath of traumatic violence, societies are less able to process a world where both hero and enemy are of the ‘same order of being’. ‘Evil’ has been used to describe both the 9/11 attacks and the Khmer Rouge genocide. Each of these events emerged out of complex political and historical circumstances, and this context is obscured by media accounts and political statements that tend towards an oversimplified rhetoric of right and wrong, or good and evil. But the idea of evil, of something beyond control and comprehension, can allow an absolution from blame and responsibility. The organizers of the SOC festival often engaged in this emotion-driven rather than reason-driven discourse, declaring the arts a tool in national and international healing after evil and disaster. One way of interpreting this is that the form of sbeik thom itself needs the reassurance that good will triumph over evil after the Khmer Rouge, and the location of the performance complemented that message for an audience aware of its associations with 9/11. The ritual elements of the beginning of the performance and the opening section, Sva Prachap, reflected this dualistic moral framework.

Tradition, heritage and memory

The main story in Wat Bo's performance, The Magical Arrowhead Dragon, or Sor Neakabas, which is taken from the Reamker, reflected the festival's themes of transformation and healing.Footnote ¹⁹ In the story, the hero Rama sends one of his soldiers, Jumpuhpean, to spy on the enemy camp of giants.Footnote ²⁰ When Jumpuhpean arrives at the camp he sees that Indrajit, the son of Ravana, king of the giants, is near to completing a seven-day ritual for immortality in order to help him defeat Rama's army. Jumpuhpean transforms himself into a bear in order to distract Indrajit from his meditation. Indrajit is furious when he learns about Jumpuhpean's trick, and the giants charge into battle. During the battle Laksmana, Rama's brother, is killed when Indrajit shoots him repeatedly with magical arrows. Rama is heartbroken when he learns of his brother's death and appeals to Garuda, king of the birds, for assistance. Garuda is able to revive Laksmana by removing all of the arrows from his body; Rama and Laksmana return to their encampment to live to fight another day. In the story, then, death is not final.

Each scene was presented with a constantly changing parade of puppet figures that were danced across the stage, often behind the screen and sometimes in front. The movements of the puppeteers and the presentation of the performance constantly connected sbeik thom to dance – and through dance to the memories of Angkor. Even though the puppeteer's feet were rarely clearly visible, the movements included stomping and lifting a leg, bent and held back with the foot flexed in a classical Cambodian dance pose. After the opening scene between White Monkey and Black Monkey a single male dancer crossed onto the stage. His movements were vigorous and sometimes monkey-like as he pranced about the stage. As he exited, a line of large puppets paraded on. Not all of the puppets looked like those often venerated in exhibits and photos. For this performance, smaller puppets were also used; the shapes presented people in simpler, more contemporary dress. These smaller puppets, which are normally used in the form of sbeik touch (‘small leather’), provided variety in the performance as well as representing ordinary Cambodian people in the mythic story. The performance was structured by a combination of static scenes of dialogue between characters, travelling scenes with music, and exciting battles. Sometimes dancers would come onstage and interact with the puppets – humans and puppets all representing characters in the drama. I have observed similar innovations in other performances in Cambodia; these were not just attempts to make the performance appeal to an international audience, but rather part of a larger trend to use Cambodian arts to speak to a contemporary audience both in and outside Cambodia. That said, these additions rarely figure in videos, television programmes, or DVDs of the form, indicating that they do not yet count as tradition.

The climactic battle between Laksmana and Ravana's soldier, Virulamuk, was performed in front of the screen by two male actors through dance (Fig. 3). Their bodies onstage cast shadows on the screen; real bodies in the present visually interacted with the mythic puppet bodies that referred to the past. In so doing, the performance echoed a dynamic explored elsewhere by SOC. The movements of the actors echoed those from the exhibit called ‘Memory Preserved: Glass Plate Photographs of Royal Cambodian Dancers’ at the Lincoln Center Library for the Performing Arts (Fig. 4). Historically, Khmer dance functioned as the embodiment of a cosmic ideal. The dancers are believed to be inspired by the apsara (a spirit of the heavens), and are an ‘embodiment of the life-creating energy’ that was likewise connected to Angkor within its architectural representation of the creation of the universe.Footnote ²¹ The bodies onstage are, to borrow Marvin Carlson's term, ‘haunted’ by the bodies from the past through memory and visual representation.Footnote ²² Judith Hamera explains that Khmer survivors are ‘reduced to shades themselves, they are both haunted registers of atrocity and avenging angels, impelled by other ghosts, even in diaspora, to reimagine the generative possibilities of Khmer culture’.Footnote ²³ Likewise, the sbeik thom performance did not mention the past, Angkor Wat or the killing fields, but wordlessly revised those memories through its reimagining based on carvings from wat (pagoda) walls and dance. The performance focused not on the tragic past, but on an idea of past glories that continue to inform some Cambodian ideas about what can be realized in the present and future. The pose of the dancer represented in the photograph and echoed onstage is meant to represent ‘Khmer’ through the apsara, and this haunts the performance of sbeik thom. This kind of representation is re-performed in many venues around Siem Reap as dancers billed as apsara dance in bars, as part of buffet dinners, and in ‘international’ stage shows for tourists. In the SOC performance, the bodies were haunted by memories of loss and destruction.

Fig. 3.

Two dancers perform the battle between Laksmana and Virulamuk. Photo by J. Goodlander.

Fig. 4.

From the exhibit of photographs at the Lincoln Center Library for the Performing Arts. Photo by J. Goodlander.

Paradoxically, perhaps, this aspect was pronounced because, in creating the production for presentation in New York, the artists worked to innovate and revise in order to appeal to an international audience. Sbeik thom is one of several art forms in Cambodia that demonstrates the value of heritage to Cambodian identity. Historian David Chandler describes how Cambodia is often conceived as a ‘changeless society’, a belief encouraged by the French colonial administration that persists today.Footnote ²⁴ Even so, the French colonial administration, King Sihanouk, tourism and national pride have each placed different values on the performing arts in Cambodia, resulting in changes to the work's aesthetics and reception.Footnote ²⁵ In the case of the SOC, the executive director, Phloeun Prim, explained that at first the troupe at Wat Bo were hesitant to innovate in their performance, preferring instead to preserve the tradition in its ‘pure’ form. They were ‘so passionate about the original form's pure preservation’, but eventually they were persuaded. ‘We spent three hours talking to Sem [Venerable Pin Sem, head monk of Wat Bo] and eventually gained his trust, and we brought in artistic advisers from the [Cambodian] Royal Ballet to provide intensive dance instruction, musical experts. We sent a lighting designer from New York to Siem Reap’. When asked about how he felt about the final result, Prim declared, ‘The results were miraculous – the team in New York couldn't believe the stage presence, the gestures, cadence of the music, the complete refinement on that first night’.Footnote ²⁶

Arguably, these innovations – and the tensions around them – reflect the recent history of the sbeik thom form. Advertisements for the SOC described sbeik thom as an ancient, sacred, ‘centuries-old tradition’.Footnote ²⁷ However, during the violent attempt by the Khmer Rouge to wipe out Cambodian culture and return the country to Year Zero, puppets were destroyed and artists were tortured and killed, requiring the Wat Bo troupe and others to reimagine, revise and reinvent the tradition of sbeik thom.

Wat Bo was founded in 1992 by the Venerable Preah Moha Vimalakdharma Pin Sem (Venerable Pin Sem), who stated, ‘We believe that the arts is the spirit, soul, and wealth for the nations, for all nations in the world’.Footnote ²⁸ While living in a refugee camp at the Thai border he realized that the puppet arts of sbeik thom and sbeik touch (the smaller and more popular shadow puppets) had all but disappeared, and he felt great sadness: ‘We wanted our art to be re-born, so I began to find ways to re-create this art form’.Footnote ²⁹ Artwork within the walls of the wat, together with childhood memories, provided insight into how sbeik thom had been performed in the past. The Venerable Pin Sem invited twenty-five other monks to join him when in 1993 the group relocated to the temple Wat Bo. The troupe sometimes performs for local festivals and celebrations, but the majority of their performances today are for foreign audiences. Historically, performances could last up to seven nights, but today there is no one who remembers how to execute the longer performance.

There are currently forty-two members of the troupe at Wat Bo, although only sixteen were able to travel to New York for SOC. Performers train at the temple for several years in order to master the skills necessary for a performance. They must learn how to hold the puppets, how to walk them across the screen, how to perform movements from Khmer dance and how to make the puppets gesture. The movements must be synchronized with the music and narration, and each character has its own particular patterns and ways of moving depending on status, size and degree of refinement. In an interview with the current troupe leader, Vann Sopheavuth, I asked how performers were selected, and he replied,

Building on Richard Schechner's notion of theatre as ‘restored behavior’, Joseph Roach writes, ‘The concept of restored behavior emerges from the cusp of the arts and human sciences as the process wherein cultures understand themselves reflexively and whereby they explain themselves to others’.Footnote ³¹ The artists worked with few memories and traces from the past to re-create an art form as a tradition for the present.

The imagery and idea of Angkor provided an important touchstone for re-creating a sbeik thom that the artists felt was authentic. Hamera writes about the longing that Khmer artists feel for some ‘pure product’; they create dance or perform with puppets in order to re-create an idealized past that probably never really existed. Hamera explains this dilemma:

The performance at SOC complicates notions of tradition and authenticity because it was presented as an ancient tradition, even as it was adapted for international audiences. Vann Sopheavuth explained to me that bringing the performance to New York was ‘a chance to share the form with another audience’ because sbeik thom was not just part of Cambodian identity, but ‘it is part of world heritage’.Footnote ³³ At both practical and theoretical levels it is not possible to imagine current Cambodian arts as anything but global, since opportunities for performance, training and publicity rely on foreign support. For SOC, Cambodian arts are not just seen as part of Cambodian identity, but rather are an important part of how Cambodians are asserting themselves in the world.Footnote ³⁴

Transnational memory beyond SOC

In the summer of 2014, a little over a year after I watched the performance in New York, I was able to travel to Cambodia and meet with the Venerable Pin Sem at Wat Bo. He spoke about his desires for the artists in the troupe to continue to develop and share their message of hope with audiences. Venerable Pin Sem was optimistic about the future of Cambodian arts and culture, especially sbeik thom. For him, the arts are an expression of Wat Bo's greater purpose, which is the teaching and practice of Buddhism. He explained that he believes all people are created equal and that peace and love are the primary values to be practised in life. Venerable Pin Sem feels that the arts in Cambodia embody and promote the universal truths of forgiveness and understanding by drawing from the Khmer past and looking towards a global future.

These global aspirations found some distinctive material manifestations during the Wat Bo troupe's time in New York, where they saw the Broadway musical Spider-Man and attended a performance at the Metropolitan Opera House. The puppeteers also talked happily about the opportunity to see other theatre and interact with other artists; through these experiences they saw Cambodian arts reflected in the mirror of another artistic nation. During the performance of Spider-Man, the theatre flew the Cambodian flag. Other opportunities have since come to the troupe. In the autumn of 2014 the group travelled to Bangkok, Thailand, to participate in the World Puppet Carnival with 166 other puppet troupes representing 80 countries. Vann Sopheavuth, the group's day-to-day leader, explained, ‘We are so proud to promote our leather theatre, our beautiful facet of traditional Khmer culture, in front of representatives from 80 countries. It is a special chance to show them who we are, where we come from and what we bring to the festival’. The group performed the same show as in SOC, but used a bonfire instead of electric light: ‘We try to do some great things that our ancestors did in the ancient times, so it will become most interesting for people in this modern era’.Footnote ³⁵ Artists from Wat Bo have continued travelling as participants in puppet exchanges hosted by the Association for Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Puppetry Association. Through the efforts of Cambodia Living Arts, the group currently performs weekly in Cambodia as well. Taken together with the complex dialogue between form, place and memory during SOC, we can see how this sbeik thom event realized possibilities of transnational performance to invigorate local performance, creating new memories and traditions.