Children of the Khmer

Cambodia Living Arts is a highly talented Phnom Penh-based company of mostly teenage performers celebrating with finesse and zest in equal measure their country’s richly diverse dance traditions. Drawn from Cambodia’s urban slums and rural areas, they represent the rising generation of post-dictatorship cultural renaissance.

With incense and candles as focus, the opening quasi-liturgical Homage to the Teacher leads into the elaborately costumed Dance of the Three Apsaras, female celestial beings of Cambodian mythology. The dancers’ statuesque poses and delicate minute movements inspired by the famous Angkor Wat temple sculptures are most gracefully executed. In total contrast, dances based on rural and coastal traditions joyfully evoke the life of peasants and fisherfolk, with brightly costumed male and female foursomes robustly expressing farming, gathering herbs and, in the Nesat dance, catching fish with wooden cages. The Savann Machha,enacting the ancient tale of Monkey King Hanuman falling in love with a golden clad mermaid, is the programme centrepiece,especially memorable for the lively duo by these gloriously-robed characters.

Bursting with enthusiasm, this youthful company presents a most appealing showcase of Cambodian culture, made doubly engaging by the atmospheric music of leng Sithul’s ensemble of traditional drums, xylophone and flutes.