Beauty Born Of Pain. (Reviews: National).

BEAUTY BORN OF PAIN DANCE, THE SPIRIT OF CAMBODIA ZELLERBACH HALL, UC BERKELEY BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA SEPTEMBER 8-9, 2001

More than one philosopher has questioned the viability of art in the face of genocide. Yet art provides spiritual sustenance for individuals throughout the horrors of war. In the 1970s, Cambodia lost between 20 and 25 percent of its population, including 90 percent of its artists, during its civil war and Khmer Rouge regime. Dance, along with other arts, had been central to Cambodian culture as an expression and instrument of Cambodian history. Ever since the surviving artists began to return to Phnom Penh in 1979 from their exile in the Cambodian countryside, their centuries-long dance tradition has been experiencing a slow, successful, and sublime resurrection, a traction of the fruits of which were presented in the touring show "Dance, the Spirit of Cambodia."

Forty classical dancers, folk dancers, musicians, singers, and costumers comprised the collaboration that brought the audience to its feet. Whether one read the program notes before or after the show, one gathered a sense of the culture's connection with the rural, the royal, and the divine.

The program opened with Robam Apsara, a dance created in the 1950s under the tutelage of Queen Kossamak Nearyrath. The robam means dance and the apsara are celestial dancers. The dance featured archetypal Cambodian movement and gestures: a deliberate pace; hyperextended elbows, wrists, and fingers; legs deeply flexed at the knee, ankle, and toe joints; the heel up by the sacrum. Each step was a meditation, from heel to sole to metatarsal to one toe at a time. Every performer exhibited a holistic awareness of the body. The dancers wore headdresses evocative of Angkor Wat as they walked along a line in flat contact with the floor. Against the polyphonic, linear progression of the pin peat ensemble (one of the oldest types of Khmer musical ensembles), the dancers rotated one-legged balances in slow promenade or stood still as statues. Level changes were nearly imperceptible as the dancers' shapes echoed the carvings found on temple walls.

Women performed all of the roles in Cambodian classical dance until the mid-twentieth century, so postures, gestures, and costuming must convey gender. Artistic Director Proeung Chhieng explained that a feminine aesthetic of flexibility and suppleness are revered in the culture and that aspiring dancers must endure painful exercises during childhood to achieve the necessary flexibility in the wrist and finger joints. One dance that did feature male performers was Robam Tunsaong, a village dance learned and documented at the Royal University of Fine Arts and reworked for theatrical presentation. The dance featured performers in the roles of two oxen, a hunter, a tiger, and a bumble bee. The movement for this rhythmic dance was characterized by a dropped pelvis, a slight pitch in the hips, and extraordinary facility for locomotion in a squat position.

The company later performed the comedic procession dance known as Chhayam. Percussionists and dancers in celebratory mode entered from the house exit doors wearing masks and red scarves. The basic elements of the dance involved clowning, slapstick, flirtation, and a performer impressing the crowd by lifting his drum high above his head with his teeth.

The grand finale was an excerpt from Reamker, the sixteenth-century Khmer version of the Hindu epic Ramayana. The dance featured the four principal characters of Cambodian dance-dramas: the female divinity or princess, the male divinity or prince, the giant or ogre, and the monkey. The dance opened with the monkeys (a role played by men since the mid-twentieth century) in masks and tails, scratching themselves and grooming each other. What ensued was the story of Preah Ream (Prince Rama) and the rescue of his kidnapped wife Neang Seda (Princess Sita) from the evil Krong Reap (Ravana). In spite of the messages inherent in the Ramayana that seem unpalatable to the Western sensibility, such as the notion of trial by fire, the dance was a stunning display of gold and light that bent our extreme notion of virtuosity into something more subtle and exquisite.

The Cambodian artists' commitment to the preservation and sharing of their classical and folk art forms was in itself a life-affirming ritual. Using art as a mnemonic device for a culture's collective memory, these dancers and musicians contributed to the effort to stop the cycle of violence in this world, inviting people to bear witness to beauty in order to remember violence. Thus, art was as connected with death as it was with life. Would that we danced instead of bombed.