Viviana Escalé

Review
Performative arts in cambodian society

Key words: Cambodia, dance, Amrita Performing arts, body memory, catharsis, performance, mental health, trauma, cross-cultural therapeutic methods.

Introduction

Recent stay in Cambodia has brought me to write down some thoughts about that experience. This text has different objectives:

1. To provide a short introduction about classical and contemporary dance in Cambodia and to bring some awareness about the effects of civil war on it.

2. To present the work of Amrita Dance Company, with which whom I had a one week artistic exchange in Pnhom Pehn.

3. To outline the power of arts and the healing role that dance (as a performative art) might have in a traumatized Society.

Dance in Cambodia

Cambodian classical dance belonged decades ago at the court.
Dancers were part of the king's private all-female dance troupe, and the different roles would be assigned according to their physical attributes, the little, pretty ones would play the women, the taller, stronger-faced ones the men and a few larger dancers took the roles of giants. After 1930, men assumed the monkey roles.

Unfortunatelly history made a dramatic turn and in 1975 the royal dancers as well as many other artists and intellectuals became targets of the brutal Pol Pot regime.
In less than four years, the whole cambodian dance and cultural heritage was entirely obliterated as a result of the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge, and approximately 90 per cent of all Cambodian classical performers were either killed or died of starvation or disease.

The few surviving masters rebuilt the classical forms bit by bit. Thanks to their efforts, after the fall of the regime, the artists reunited in 1980 for the first time in a performance.

Different cambodian and international institutions have played and are still playing an important role in the post-war mission to revive and preserve Cambodia’s performing arts legacy.
While my short stay in Pnhom Pehn, the capital of Cambodia, I had the possibility to get to know one of those organizations personally, the Amrita Performing Arts.

Amrita Performing Arts

Amrita Performing Arts is an NGO comitted to create a plattform for performing artists to find their own and distinctive voice

It hosts a group of talented, young dancers trained in Khmer classic dance.
The company encourages the exchange of its artists with western dancers, teachers and choreographers in order to share knowledge and experiences through contemporary dance.

The repertory of the company embraces the work of local and international choreographers and the pieces reflect the complexity of living in present Cambodia.

They are confronted with the responsability of preservation of the classical Khmer dance and the artists are aware of their role of care-takers of their traditional heritage. At the same time they belong to a generation that is looking for new forms in dance in order to express their individuality.

Their work in the rehearsal space and on the stage focuses on investigating how traditional forms can evolve and transform.
They are consciouss about the burden of the past and at the same time are facing the future with an open mind full of new ideas.

Some of the company works appeal directly to the horrors of the civil war and play an important role as a reconciliation.

The wound of the civil war

The wound of the aftermath of war is far from being healed, murderers are still unpunished and it was only four years ago when the first Khmer Rouge member was found guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced to prison.
Unfortunatelly that has been an isolated step towards reconciliation since cambodian Government has opposed extensive trials of former Khmer Rouge mass murderers in order to avoid possible political instability.

The atrocities of the genocide have caused and keep causing extensive psychical pain in the population.
Recent studies inform that more than 30 years after the genocide, those painful memories continue to cause post-traumatic stress disorder and other forms of emotional trauma in survivors and their descendants.

Western countries have developed treatments to cope with Post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), like different forms of therapy or medication, but according to Sandra Mattar, an associate professor of trauma at St. Mary's College of California “We should not assume that treatments developed for PTSD in the West are helpful or useful in non- Western contexts,”

Muny Sothara, a psychologist with the Cambodian Transcultural Psychological Organization (TPO), an NGO providing mental health treatment, based in Phnom Penh,

says that many Cambodians diagnosed with PTSD believe their symptoms are signs of the unsettled after life of their dead relatives.

Some buddist monks have been trained in western psychotherapeutic methods to give some ease to the suffering population, and cambodian mental health professionals see the fusion of psychotherapy and Buddhism as an effective way of dealing with grief, tailored for the context of their society. Although they also aknowledge that widespread poverty and limited mental health care have been an obstacle for mental health progress and contribute to transgenerational trauma. Those same professionals have found that trauma is being passed from one generation to the next.

Christine Caldwell in her studies of cross-cultural healing systems came to the conclusion that many indigenous cultures made use of movement and movement ritual.

Body centered and self regulatory way. "Their cures focused, in many cases, on restoring an alignment with natural order.

Sothara believes that “Trauma [that is not dealt with] can transfer from the first generation to the second. It is in the way they raise their children, [their] aggressiveness [and] inappropriate reactions,”

Phenomenology and ist recognition of the body has having an independent kind of memory might also offer an explanation to transgenerational trauma.
The french phenomenological philosopher Merleau-Ponty in his Phenomenology of perception, described the habitual body (corps habituel) as the basis of our being- towards-the-world (être au monde):

"The body establishes itself in every situation and attaches us to the world by the invisible threads of its peculiar ‘operative intentionality’ – threads that have formed already in our earliest contacts with the world" (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 74, p. 114). Fuchs, „The phenomenology of body memory“

Prof. Fuchs from Heidelberg University talks in his article „The phenomenology of body memory“ about 6 different types of body memory, one of them being the traumatic memory. According to him „the most indelible impression in body memory is caused by trauma“.

„The body recollects the trauma as if it happened anew. Thus, the victim re-experiences feelings of pain, anxiety, and terror again and again, combined with fragments of intense images...“
...“the felt memory of an alien intrusion into the body has irreversibly shaken the primary trust into the world. Every person is turned into a potential threat“

Dance Movement Therapy and contemporary dance

Dance Movement Therapy is one of the creative forms of psychotherapy. It deals with the body and its memories and makes use of the body, of psychotherapy and of dance/movement to help the client to open the meaning cores of body memory and untangle their latent motives and feelings.

Unfortunatelly cambodians might not have the possibility to experience the benefits of DMT, but they do have the possibility to experience „the felt body“ through their own bodies and through the peformers bodies.

Amrita possesses a highly qualified group of dancers who are able to open their hearts on the stage and express a big range of emotions. An act of communication and generosity towards their audience.
Already b.C Aristotle made us aware in his books of the effect of Catharsis to the spectator, he defines Catharsis as the purification or cleansing of emotions through art. Audience watching a performance can experience two essential components of catharsis: the emotional aspect and the cognitive aspect, and as a result a positive change. Opressed feelings are being expressed and tension is being released

Could then be a contemporary dance performance understood as a contemporary form of healing ritual in urban society?

Dosamantes-Beadry reports in her paper about a client who first creates and performs a „Fire Dance“ as an own healing ritual which afterwards becomes a dance ritual performed by and for traumatized survivors of a fire tragedy, being the performance a trigger to communal emotional catharsis.

Probably other professional choreographers have done similar work in this field which I’m not aware of, but the motivation is most of the time to create art.
Amogst others for example the work of dance companies like DINA13 in Germany, Alta Realitat in Spain, Candoco in UK or Epic Arts in Cambodia. Which play an important role in breaking schemes in the way society perceives disability and understand esthetics.

But it could be an interesting to shift the aim and conscioussly create a ritual performance by and for the traumatized members of the cambodian community which would trigger to communal emotional catharsis.

We shouldn’t understimate the power of arts and the healing power of dance and creativity in its different forms. A communicative power that might make an inmense contribution to society. In a society where psychological treatment is rare, arts might play an special role in it and make a great contribution in the health of the cambodian society.

References

Mollica, R. (2013): The enduring mental health impact of mass violence: A community comparison study of Cambodian civilians living in Cambodia and Thailand
Int J Soc Psychiatry

Lopes Cardozo, B. (2012): Mental health survey among landmine survivors in Siem Reap province, Cambodia. Medicine, Conflict and Survival,Volume 28, Issue 2, 2012.

Hinton and Lewis-Fernández, (2010): The cross-cultural validity of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: Implications for DSM-5. Review. Depression and Anxiety 0 : 1–19 (2010)

Dosamantes-Beadry, I. (1998): Regression-Integration:Central Psychodynamic Principle in Rituals of Transition. The Arts in Psychotherapy, Ed. Elsevier Science

Fuchs, T. (2000):„The phenomenology of body memory“ Das Gedächtnis des Leibes, Phänomenologische Forschungen, 5, 71-89.

Merleau Ponty, (1962): Phenomenology of perception. English translation C. Smith. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

http://www.wikipedia.org

Catharsis. Consulted on 24.02.14

http://www.irinnews.org/

Localizing treatment for emotional trauma in Cambodia. Consulted on 24.02.14

http://amritaperformingarts.org