Abstract
Current expressions of Cambodian classical musical theater are framed in reaction to the 1970s civil war and genocide, through a postcolonial lens, and in praise of an idealized past. With the rise of an online display of audiovisual archives, organizations as well as individuals, in Cambodia and abroad, gained the ability to contribute to the remembrance and preservation of performing arts through the Internet. Such tools facilitate reformulations of the past to support present-day social and political needs. Considering initiatives ranging from web-based data collections to social media sites, this chapter questions the processes and intentionality with which people rely on the online representation of performing arts to actively engage with the past of Cambodia and advocate for today’s representation of cultural identity and capital.
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Notes
- 1.
The French protectorate ran from 1863 until 1953 and used Cambodian musical theater and dance as a skillfully staged faire-valoir of their colonial assets. A striking example may be seen in the Cambodian participation to the International Colonial Exhibit held in Paris in 1931, an event during which the royal ballet was presented, along with the near real-size reproduction temple of Angkor Wat housed in a park in the outskirts of the city.
- 2.
If the process of public secularization of the Royal Ballet had started prior to the official opening of the Royal University of Fine Arts, in 1965, it is with its institutionalization that it became increasingly accessible to the population. In this university, the royal dance and musical theater forms where taught along with traditional popular music and dance practices. Court and countryside arts were thus housed under a same roof
- 3.
While recognized by UNESCO as early as 2003, when the concept of cultural heritage of humanity was implemented, it is only in 2008 that both were formally inscribed onto the list.
- 4.
While there is no question that dance, theater, and music have been tightly linked to expression of authority as well as the strengthening and legitimization of people in power as early as the Angkorian times, these expressions have changed through time and have been used to support various political agendas while still remaining a symbol of royalty. The modes of performances (including libretti and musical instruments) one may see today translate changes that occurred after the fall of Angkor (see Khoury 2014; Shapiro 1994).
- 5.
See notably, the work of survivor and movie director Rithy Panh, who also created the Bophana Audiovisual Resource Center, a repository for audiovisual and sound archives that display an emphasis on the war period and the Khmer Rouge regime.
- 6.
Phka sla is a type of flower that the groom offers to his bride in Cambodian traditional wedding and Angkar, “organization,” was a way of referring to the Khmer Rouge regime. This work has been choreographed by Sophiline Cheam-Shapiro, director of the Sophiline Art Ensemble, and has been part of a larger visual art project produced by the Bophana Audiovisual Resource Center and that aims to address the policy of forced marriage and rape that was enforced at the time of the Democratic Kampuchea. A recording of the full performance can be viewed on the Bophana Center’s YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-6yTphGDuI, last accessed on 08/23/2019).
- 7.
- 8.
Svaengrok karpit (/svaɛɲ rɔɔ(ɂ) kaa pɨt/), in Khmer, accessible at: http://www.truthcambodia.com/ (last accessed on September 07, 2018).
- 9.
DC-Cam was created in 1995, as a field office of the Cambodian Genocide Program of Yale University, before running independently (Greene 2015, 580). The website was created later and the YouTube channel was launched in 2010, having reached over 850,000 visits between then and July 2019. Documentation and testimonies gathered by DC-Cam serve research and studies on the Khmer Rouge period as well as on survivorship (see Greene 2015). A website has been implemented by DC-Cam specifically to support education about the genocide (http://www.khmerrougehistory.org/, in Khmer).
- 10.
https://www.youtube.com/user/DCCam2011/featured (last accessed on July 16, 2019).
- 11.
Let us mention the student implementation of the platform “Living Memory of the Khmer,” which is hosted on the Northern Illinois University’s server, as part of the Southeast Asia Digital Library, and which aims to display accounts of individuals’ journeys from the late 1940s to the 1990s. (http://sea.lib.niu.edu/islandora/object/SEAImages%3ALKVideos, accessed on September 07, 2018).
- 12.
https://www.nypl.org/blog/2013/12/11/khmer-dance-project-videos (last accessed October 2, 2018).
- 13.
It breaks down as 12 female and 3 male dancers, 4 singers, 1 musician, 1 costume specialist, and 1 blacksmith. Numerous people have more than one interview displayed in the collection.
- 14.
His testimony was also recorded within the Northern Illinois University-hosted “Living Memory of the Khmer” Project mentioned earlier.
- 15.
See Khoury (2016) for a detailed application of this concept to the performance space of musical theaters.
- 16.
The French National Agency for Scientific Research (CNRS) has gathered a collection of Cambodian audio archives of musical performances as well as narrations and ritual speeches collected by colonial administrators and researchers in Cambodia from the early twentieth century until today, along with recordings made in Paris during the 1931 colonial exhibit (see Khoury and Simonnot 2014). https://archives.crem-cnrs.fr/search/advance/ (last accessed on September 3, 2018). Audio archives from the French National Library (BNF) are also available through the Europeana Sound Project (https://www.europeana.eu/). In the US, the Smithsonian Folkways Recordings also published recordings of Cambodian music and made them available for purchase through their online library (https://folkways.si.edu/search?query=cambodia).
- 17.
For a large part, these archival documents were produced by representatives of or on behalf of foreign countries where these documents were kept and, for some, digitized later on. Realized with the necessary financial support and technological means, these documents were kept in home institutions and therefore sheltered from disappearing as a collateral damage of the war.
- 18.
- 19.
Cropped to hide the caption from the postcard, it illustrates a note on the representation of dance and drama on temples (https://asiasociety.org/dance-and-drama-cambodian-temples).
- 20.
Applications and presentations can be viewed at: https://ich.unesco.org/en/USL/lkhon-khol-wat-svay-andet-01374 for Cambodia and https://ich.unesco.org/en/RL/khon-masked-dance-drama-in-thailand-01385 for Thailand (last accessed on July 17, 2019). It should be noted that the Cambodian application is focused on the rural practice of a specific troupe affiliated with a village monastery, the Wat Svay Andet, while the Thai application concerns the institutional practice of masked theater. Yet, as an institutional practice of the male theater also exists in Cambodia, the two applications are often inaccurately presented as being about the same practice.
- 21.
https://www.facebook.com/Malemaskdance/ and https://youtu.be/9zkDR6HiJ0Y (last accessed on July 17, 2019)
- 22.
Note that numerous spellings are used to refer to this theater, among which lkhon khol and lakhon khol.
- 23.
See clip at: https://www.facebook.com/Malemaskdance/videos/1182188128543780/ (last consulted on September 16, 2018).
- 24.
It is worth noting that Facebook has implemented a setting to display “most relevant” comments on posts’ threads making these compulsory series of messages not visible unless the viewer manually changes the settings. Furthermore, the page administrators have the discretion to erase such comments, just as they have the possibility to ban access to specific commentators. Within the span of a few days in September 2018, I have observed the clearing of such comments on unrelated posts, and their saturation once again, by members of either Thai or Cambodian communities.
- 25.
See notably, discussions on the Thai online chat room platform Pantip.com (and particularly https://pantip.com/topic/35234817 or https://pantip.com/topic/35227642, last consulted on September 19, 2018), or on the clip dedicated to the lakhaon khaol and titled “the difference between Khmer and Thai” on the YouTube Channel of the Cambodian platform “Here and There,” which edits short clips on current social and cultural trends (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24gLyQOFob4&t=169s, last consulted on September 19, 2018).
- 26.
https://www.facebook.com/hunsencambodia/, last accessed on September 19, 2018.
- 27.
While the abundance of documentation available is overwhelming, algorithms of search engines such as Google bring to the forefront the most visited sites, leading to a selection by the frequency of access rather than accuracy.
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Khoury, S. (2020). (Re)Producing the Past Online: Oral History and Social Media–Based Discourse on Cambodian Performing Arts in the Aftermath of Genocide. In: Zucker, E., Simon, D. (eds) Mass Violence and Memory in the Digital Age. Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39395-3_5
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