Stayin' Alive

Crossing cultures and art forms
Friday, October 5, 2007

By EVELYN SHIH
STAFF WRITER

If you are surprised to hear that there is a Cambodian classical dance version of "The Magic Flute," you wouldn't be the first.
[Scene from Pamina Devi, courtesy of performingarts.ufl.edu]

Sophiline Cheam Shapiro, the choreographer of that work, wasn't sure at first why she had been asked to take on the Mozart opera. Trained in the tradition of Cambodian dance, she and her husband, John, run the Khmer Arts Academy in Long Beach, Calif., and in Cambodia. Peter Sellars, the director of a festival last year in honor of Mozart's 250th birthday, asked her to create a new piece from the original's narrative and theme of magic and transformation.

Shapiro eventually found her own way to tackle the narrative. John Shapiro spoke recently about Cambodian classical dance and the overlap with Viennese opera.

Q. What was Sophiline's entry point into the story of "The Magic Flute"?

Most of her works focus on women, especially women who are victims of other people's foolishness. So she became attracted to the character of Pamina. In the opera, she doesn't appear until the second act. But Sophiline was interested in this character as the victim of these extreme ideologies: the queen of the night as the ultra-feminine, and Sorastro the ultra-masculine. She thought, if you broke this down to a domestic squabble, it would be about much bigger things.

So she made Sorastro Pamina's father, and as it is in the original, the Queen is her mother, and they are fighting over her, but they're ignoring her at the same time. Their battle is really about themselves and has nothing to do with her welfare.

If you look at recent Cambodian history, Sophiline has survived many extraordinary radical regime changes. And all of them come in condemning the regimes of the past. But none of them improved the lives of the people.

So she said, this makes sense in this narrative. It's reflective of my experience of extreme ideology. If it doesn't help the people it's useless.

Q. Where did Cambodian classical dance come from?

The dances were original temple dances as a religious ritual, and then when Cambodia began a Buddhist country, it became a court dance. This was partly because the court was the only institution that could afford it in an agricultural society. ...

When Prince Sihanouk would go on state visits to other countries, he would bring a dance troupe to perform for dignitaries. It was that closely tied with national identity and heritage.

Q. What happened to the art form during the Pol Pot regime?

During the 1970s, an estimated 90 percent of classical dancers and artists died, whether from disease, slaughter or overwork. ... They were symbols of the monarchy, of the past. They were anachronisms. That was the regime's rhetoric: This is entirely new. We're rejecting the old. And if you have even a symbolic connection to the old, we'll kill you.

Afterwards, the 10 percent of dancers who remained struggled to revive the form. The school of fine arts was reopened in 1981, and Sophiline studied there with dancers who had danced in the court.

But the arts in Cambodia have not been able to adjust to new laissez-faire capitalism, adopted in 1990 after a socialist regime. So the arts began to decay again, this time not from slaughter, but through incompetence and lack of leadership. There is no infrastructure for the arts.

What we're trying to do is to create a troupe that can be a model for how the arts can not only survive in Cambodia, but flourish.

Q. What is music like in a classical dance performance?

The ensemble is called a pin peat. It's largely percussive, made of xylophones and gongs and drums, along with a quadruple-reed oboe called the sralai. Four vocalists are also part of our music ensemble. They partly narrate the piece through singing, and they can sing dialogue as well. It's quite limited; you wouldn't get the whole story from listening to them. The narrative is more in the dance itself.

There is a repertory of motifs in classical dance. Ones used for entering, exiting, for flying, for love scenes. These motifs are used in any given piece. Cambodian music is not notated; musicians learn it by memory. Sophiline arranges these motifs for her piece, and then she writes lyrics that are in the traditional meter and rhyming scheme.

Q. It seems like the piece might be a little difficult to understand for non-Cambodian audiences, at least at first.

One of the advantages of doing "The Magic Flute" for Western audiences is that many people are familiar with that story. It opens up the window for a lot of people into this highly stylized and abstract dance form, this music they've never heard before. If you know the story and who the characters are, you're not trying to decipher the story; you're looking at this particular language [as it] tells this story.

E-mail: shih@northjersey.com

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