Embodying Tradition: Khmer Classical Dance and Images of Queer Presence and Possibility

Abstract

In 2015, US-born Prumsodun Ok established Cambodia’s first gay Khmer classical dance company. The company’s mission is to preserve the artistic tradition of Khmer classical dance, as well as to reflect the contemporary experiences of queer people in Cambodia. In this essay, I examine the intersection of the dance company’s success with diasporic formations and Cambodia’s economic investment in tourism, as well as explore the processes involved in the artistic production and performance by Prumsodun Ok & NATYARASA’s dancers — self-identification, costuming, and the embodiment of narrative — that suggest that this reinterpretation of Khmer classical dance is an intentional effort by queer Cambodians to introduce expressions of queer possibility and presence in Cambodia’s national cultural image.

Keywords: Khmer classical dance, queerness, Prumsodun Ok, tourism, alternative art

Introduction

            “Do you want to see something weird?” I was seven, maybe eight years-old, sitting in the backseat of an SUV between my childhood best friends, twin boys, and their mother, Sophiline Cheam Shapiro, as we weaved through Saturday morning Phnom Penh traffic. My friends’ mother took the four fingers of her left hand with her right and pushed them back. They bent in the direction fingers ought not to bend and, defying any understanding of anatomy I could fathom, her fingers reclined to lay flat against the back of her hand with incredible ease. She explained that she, as a Khmer classical dancer trained in the tradition since she was young, had exercised her fingers to be unusually flexible — fit for the hyperextended hand gestures required by the dance’s foundational movements. She showed me the four primary hand gestures, each one representing a stage in the cycle of life — the tree, the leaf, the flower, and the fruit. The cycle ends and begins again with the dropping of the fruit and the growth of a new tree. Intrinsic in Khmer classical dance is the story of reproduction — a fitting analogy for an art form that is continually reproduced through the act of performance. 

            Sometime after that car ride, I told my mother that I wanted to take dance lessons. They did not last long, as no hobby I picked up at that age did, but for a brief time, I trained to dance a piece from the Reamker, Cambodia’s version of the Indian epic Ramayana, in the role of Hanuman — the fierce monkey general who falls in love with a mermaid. Since the French colonial period, the role of Hanuman has been played by a male performer. Still, I insisted it was the only role I wanted to learn, and so, with the help of Cheam Shapiro, I began taking private lessons from a professional performer alongside Cheam Shapiro’s sons.

            About a decade later, I learned of another Cambodian dancer — Prumsodun Ok. Ok has also challenged the gender roles prescribed to the contemporary practice of Khmer classical dance, though admittedly to a much more radical extent than I had as third grader during my three-week stint as a Hanuman trainee. Ok grew up in the inner city of Long Beach, California, home to the largest diasporic Cambodian community in the US.[1] At age sixteen, he began formal training in Khmer classical dance under the mentorship of Sophiline Cheam Shapiro, who was among the first generation to graduate from the national School of Fine Arts following its reopening after the Khmer Rouge regime and served on the faculty from 1988 to 1991.[2] She is also the artistic director and co-founder of Khmer Arts, an organization committed to fostering Khmer classical dance in Cambodia and its diaspora. Khmer Arts has two main components — a dance academy based in Long Beach, California and a professional classical dance and music company based in Cambodia. In 2015, Ok founded Prumsodun Ok & NATYARASA, which is, in his own words, “Cambodia’s first gay dance troupe,”[3] and has been reported as such by several national and international media outlets.

This all-male dance troupe has garnered international attention over the past few years for igniting discourse about the positioning of queerness within national conceptions of Cambodian cultural identity. An examination of the processes involved in the artistic production and performance by Prumsodun Ok & NATYARASA’s dancers — self-identification, costuming, and the embodiment of narrative — suggests that this reinterpretation of Khmer classical dance is an intentional effort by queer Cambodians to introduce expressions of queer possibility and presence in Cambodia’s national cultural image.

Tourism and National Images

            Research specifically focused on Prumsodun Ok & NATYARASA (hereinafter sometimes referred to as the Company) is limited, as the Company is still young. Of the few studies published, Saori Hagai’s work stands out in its analysis of how Cambodia’s emphasis on cultural tourism in its economy and national identity allowed the Company to emerge in a society that otherwise holds conservative views towards queer issues. Hagai argues that tourism is a “cultural arena which contributes to the deconstruction of a landscape of a country through the exposure to the wider global gaze.”[4] In other words, economies reliant on international tourism can incentivize an investment in accommodating foreign cultural values.

In the case of the Company specifically, Hagai first identifies Khmer classical dance as a central component in the formation of Cambodia’s national cultural image. The link between classical dance and what is considered essential to Cambodia is emphasized not only by international voices attempting to characterize Cambodia’s cultural history, but also domestically by the national government looking to emphasize “its historical and cultural value to the economy” in an era of “post-conflict national identity reconstruction.”[5]

Over the past several decades, scholars have continually identified the Khmer classical dance tradition as an “indestructible emblem of Cambodian-ness” in the international consciousness.[6] Dance scholar Rachmi Diyah Larasati describes dance tradition as “the construction of national identity… based on an imaginary past”[7] — a country’s historical narratives and values embodied and reproduced by its citizens to lend a greater sense of national cohesion than might otherwise be historically justified. Inherent in tradition is an implication of legacy. To identify a practice as traditional is to assert a certain account of the past. With clearly defined and codified roles for male and female performers, what is packaged as traditional in the mainstream representation of Khmer classical dance today presents a version of Cambodian art and history that has written queerness out.

To reconcile the attitudes towards queerness held by what she terms the country’s “conservative institutions [and the] general public”[8] with the relative success and acceptance of Prumsodun Ok & NATYARASA as “ambassadors of Khmer arts,”[9] Hagai proposes that the Cambodian government’s interest in tourism has created an investment in the cultural values of foreign tourist audiences that has allowed for the Company’s work to be recognized as an asset that will contribute economically to Cambodia’s tourist industry. She characterizes Prumsodun Ok, “in the context of contemporary Southeast Asia, as a ‘post-traditional artist,’ who seeks to untether himself from postcolonial exotic preconceptions imposed by doctrines of authenticity and make themselves relevant to diverse global audiences.”[10]

Though Hagai’s argument convincingly identifies an important relationship between Cambodia’s artistic practices and foreign influence, her analysis does not thoroughly consider how the emergence of queer interpretations of Khmer classical dance can be centered in the efforts of queer Cambodians and the cultural politics and history internal to the country. Without this consideration, her argument suggests that representations of Cambodian queer possibility and historical presence are not inherent to Cambodian culture and instead require external influence and the centering of foreign interests which, in this case specifically, are rooted in Euro-American LGBTQ+ rights discourse and advocacy.[11]

The Company’s success cannot simply be attributed to a general alignment with “the increasing resonance of the LGBTQ movement across the world.”[12] The tradition of dance in contemporary Cambodia is yoked to the country’s recent history of war, genocide, and revolution. Under Khmer Rouge rule, “close to 90% of Cambodia’s professional artists perished.”[13] Only a handful of masters, experts in Khmer classical dance, survived and were able to train a new generation of dancers as the country was first rebuilding itself.[14] As a performance art, dance cannot be severed from the dancer. These new talents bring to their practice the contemporary experiences of being Cambodian, which often involves a relationship to the diaspora. Hagai claims that “Ok is a symbol that outsiders can serve an important and evolving role as stewards of the classical arts.”[15] Though there is debate among contemporary Khmer people on who is considered an outsider to Cambodia, given that the origins of the largest recent Cambodian diasporic event are inseparable from contemporary Cambodian national identity formation, I take issue with the positioning of Ok as an “outsider.” To reject children of the diaspora in what is considered “Cambodian” is to claim that the origins of that diaspora — the war, genocide, and forced displacement — do not hold weight in defining the Cambodian experience. The violent rupture of the Khmer Rouge period in Cambodian history meant that so much of the revitalization after 1979 was indeed a mix of efforts in the diaspora, in the borderlands, in Cambodia, and collaborations across these spaces. In more recent years, much of the cultural innovation involves collaborative efforts with Cambodians in the country and in the diaspora traveling and working together. The transnational identities of individuals like Ok or Cheam Shapiro do not make their experiences within Cambodia’s official state borders, or the less defined cultural spaces of Cambodia that exist outside those borders, any more “other.” The characterization of members of the diaspora as foreign can contribute to “the widespread belief that LGBT sexualities are Western imports in Cambodia.”[16]

The infusion of queerness into the Company’s reinterpretation of classical dance is an intentional act of self-representation and an assertion that queerness has, and many ways has always had, a place in Cambodia. This practice is not only meaningful to them as artists, but also to Cambodians more broadly as performing art is central to their public recreation of identity.

Processes of Self-Identification

There is a clear choice in how Ok, his dancers, and the Company represent themselves. Prumsodun Ok & NATYARASA is not simply a collection of classical dancers who happen to identify as gay. The self-identification as “Cambodia’s first gay dance troupe” in media coverage of the group signals in their choices an active role in shaping their identity and how others see them. For a marginalized individual to claim a label is for them to assert their membership in a community that holds a certain social meaning. Sometimes that meaning, even if the community actually encompasses much more nuanced and diverse experiences than what is popularly understood, stands in conflict with the individual’s marginalized identity.

Firstly, there is the title of “choreographer,” which Ok claims. This title is one that recognizes agency. It recognizes influence. The term choreographer moves Khmer classical dance away from the traditional conceptualization of divine authorship[17] and situates it within the authority of contemporary Cambodians. It privileges the moving, living body above all. Ok’s decision to call himself a choreographer recognizes both an evolving living element inherent in the art form as well as the significance and contribution of his own identity and lived experiences as a gay Cambodian in infusing that art form with new life. At the same time, for the Company’s members to identify as Khmer classical dancers places themselves within a legacy of cultural and artistic stewardship. NATYARASA’s identification as a Khmer classical dance company signals the formation of a community. It asserts group belonging and recognizes the potential of Cambodian queer spaces formed through the collective assertion of Khmer queer subjectivities.

            The discourse surrounding Prumsodun Ok & NATYARASA rests in the core tension between the labels discussed above and the identification of being “gay.” To be gay does not have a universal connotation. Though the term of “LGBT” is often employed in Western discourse, it serves as an inadequate characterization of Cambodian queer subjectivities as these categories “have no equivalents in the Khmer language.”[18] Instead, the Khmer language insists on a fluid understanding of gender and sexuality that reflects a cultural “rejection of restrictive identity categories.”[19] For example, khteuy, a term which has been in the Khmer vocabulary for centuries and is still popularly used today, has diverse meanings and is generally used to describe individuals who express an identity that exists beyond the stereotypical gendered understandings of male or female. However, while khteuy is invoked in describing “personality or sexual attributes,” as noted by Phong Tan in her ethnographic research, “no one uses the term to make any allusion to sexual behavior.[20] This de-sexualization of descriptors of sexuality and gender is seen across the Khmer language and rooted in the country’s cultural prioritizations. Tan found that khteuy is generally “deprecatory when used by a non-khteuy,”[21] which infuses the term with “inherently radical potential.”[22] “Queer” is perhaps the English term that most accurately represents how non-heteronormative Khmer gender and sexual identities might be characterized, capturing both an elastic understanding and a radical nature.

Perhaps due to this public de-sexualization and fluid understanding of queer subjects in Cambodia, queerness is not openly politicized to the extent it is in many Western societies today, and it is certainly not associated with religious taboos akin to those you might see in common interpretations of Christian doctrine. Cambodia is a predominantly Buddhist country, and there is nothing in Cambodian Buddhism that speaks against homosexuality. In a 2019 interview with Dance Magazine, Ok says, “People are often surprised to hear that I feel safer as a gay man in Cambodia than I do in the United States. Maybe it’s because of Buddhism, or maybe it’s because a traditional approach to sexuality can still be felt (one not so rigidly labeled). But I can feel an exciting sense of openness and acceptance.”[23] It is interesting that in the English-language media, Ok and others in the Company use the term “gay” to describe the identities within the Company and the Company as a collective. This use employs a Western politicization of labelling that historically has been used to define and assert the presence of gender and sexual minorities in countries like the United States. The Company recognizes that a form of self-representational power is accessed through the process of naming — that to impose a recognition of oneself as both a cultural steward and a gay man is to assert queerness into Cambodia’s cultural image through an international and diasporic lexicon.

Reimagining Costuming

The dance company also embraces an active reinterpretation of traditional costumes, which serves to further communicate that they are not only presenting a traditional form but re-imagining it in the process. In his approach to costuming, Prumsodun Ok strives to “provocatively experiment with Angkorian imagery outside of the nation-state’s policy of ‘preservation, re-construction and revitalization.’”[24] For example, the Company’s male dancers wear traditionally female and feminine clothes that do not attempt to obscure the male body but instead intentionally draw attention to the co-existence of the male body in a feminine form or character — a mode of queer imagery that perhaps speaks more to Khmer conceptualizations of queerness that privilege the expression of character above an explicit sexualization as discussed in the previous section.

The Company’s approach to costuming has received a lot of criticism for its use of bareness — exposure of parts of the body, like the chest, that are seen as immodest and even insulting to the traditions of the art form by some. The contemporary covering of Khmer classical dancers’ bodies is an expectation that can be traced back to the period of King Ang Duong’s rule in the mid-19^th century. In part due to his interest in establishing a good relationship with colonial France, Ang Duong revised the Chbap Srey, the women’s code, to specify “women’s place in and responsibility for maintaining social order and peace with the family and broader society” as part of his efforts to bring Cambodia into the modern era.[25] The emphasis on modesty arose during this time and persisted under the 90-year period of the French protectorate of Cambodia, in which there were explicit processes of defining how Khmer classical dance should manifest aesthetically in colonial France’s efforts to make the art tradition “more consumable for tourists” as they established a new tourism industry in Cambodia.[26]

Angkorian carvings depict female dancers as bare-breasted and in dress closer to that of the Company’s than the mainstream contemporary costuming. This is not to assert that the Company’s aesthetic representations are more authentically Khmer just because they draw resemblance to the bas-reliefs of Angkor. Instead, it acknowledges the Company’s efforts to tap into and subvert the historical traditions of seeking legitimacy. From the French protectorate of Cambodia to Democratic Kampuchea to the People’s Republic of Kampuchea to the modern-day Kingdom of Cambodia, one effort has remained consistent — the attempt to establish authority and legitimacy in reference to Angkor. Each of these States have all used imagery of Angkor in their flag. It is contested cultural property. Understanding Khmer classical dance’s “historical supplicancy to royal and national political projects,”[27] the Company’s interpretations of aesthetic tradition challenge the idea of an assumed legitimate State authority in defining Cambodian-ness. The queering of their costuming positions queer identities with the aesthetic and visual vocabulary of a form central to Cambodia’s contemporary image of cultural identity by recognizing and undermining the historical lexicon of legitimacy.

Gestures, Narrative, and Queer Intimacy

            Finally, there is the reinterpretation of gestural vocabulary to explore queer desire and intimacy. The Company’s work runs against a modern, socio-political project to revive mainstream Khmer classical dance. Her Royal Highness Buppha Devi, the Royal Cambodian Ballet’s cultural representative, stated that the Ballet’s first priority in regards to the dance tradition, Cambodia’s “fragile heritage,” was to “keep, revive, and preserve the dance and bring back dignity to Cambodia and its people.”[28]

Conversely, Ok is explicit in his attempt to destabilize Angkorian myth by visualizing queer desire in time-honored narratives designed to speak to the origin stories of the Khmer people and the country’s social order. By recasting traditionally gender-defined roles in narratives that visualize love and lust, the Company uses Khmer classical dance’s existing vocabulary to communicate a gestural intimacy between male characters that “situates the love between men in the ritual-poetic space in which Khmer dance is set,… stretching and re-choreographing the image of ultimate social order: heaven.”[29] The dance form not only holds an artistic and cultural weight, but a spiritual one too. It is considered to contain “rituals of re-membering” and is understood by many to be a “mediation with the spirits of the land, the ancestors, the deities, and the royalty.”[30]

Ok articulates a personal battle with “layered forces of erasure” brought forth by his intersectional identity as a gay diasporic Cambodian, prompting Prumsodun Ok & NATYARASA’s two core missions — “to give new life to a tradition that remains vulnerable” and to give “an often misunderstood and stigmatized community a chance to be celebrated as caretakers of heritage.”[31] To visualize queerness within narratives of Cambodian mythology, within practices of ritual, and within divine and spiritual spaces, is to make a claim of essential belonging — a historical and future queer belonging not just within the legal constructions of the nation-state, but also within every Khmer cultural and spiritual formation.

Imagining the Future of Queer Khmer Dance

            It would be ignorant to deny the importance of tourism in expanding the economic viability of a broader range of expression in classical Khmer dance, yet it is important as well to investigate the factors motivating the Company’s emergence, as its success has required such personal risk. Prumsodun Ok & NATYARASA’s story is complex and demands recognition of the artists’ agency and approach to recreating the form. This reinvention of Khmer classical dance emerged at a time of rich exchange between Cambodia and its diaspora, and the Company’s dancers embody evolving notions of what it means to be Cambodian. The future of the form depends not just on Western consumption but is tied up with the efforts of Cambodians within the country’s geographical and, more expansively, cultural borders to question and refashion Khmer identities. The efforts of Prumsodun Ok & NATYARASA to queer Khmer classical dance speak to a conceptualization of Cambodian-ness that goes beyond a singular, royally or state-sanctioned national identity and instead recognizes the multiplicity of identities within Cambodia’s dynamic cultural sphere.