Composed and choreographed by Peter Chin
A Tribal Crackling Wind Presentation
at the Enwave Theatre
February 6-9, 2008

   After years of research and study in Cambodia, Peter Chin has created a 70-minute multi-media dance piece that celebrates the cultural heritage that Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge terrorists tried to destroy in the 80s. Using three Canadian dancers (Louise Laberge-Cote, Andrea Nann, Heidi Strauss) and two exceptionally good Cambodian male dancers (Phon Sopheap and Yim Savann), Chin has fashioned an often beautiful, sometimes haunting abstract work that explores questions of creative and cultural energy without necessarily clarifying their codes in an inter-cultural exchange. Moodily lit by Arun Srinivasan, expressively costumed by Chin and Samara McAdam, enriched by Cylla von Tiedemann’s evocative videography, and set to a hypnotic score (strong in flute, drum, and bell) and documentary sound design by Garnet Willis, the piece finds extraordinary poetic and powerful imagery in quotidian Cambodian life. David Duclos’ set design is principally suggestive of decay and fissure. The back wall is a tall, jagged white form with palpable cracks and an opening through which the dancers can move as if in the mouth of a cave. It is from within this darkness that the light of life and creative energy sometimes emerges.

   The videography is extraordinary without even seeming to be so, mixing scenes from daily life—bustling street scenes, moments of domestic intimacy, park idylls, meditating monks—with abstractions of experience—a school of koi undulating in water, fireflies teeming like bacilli, verdant vegetable life, crumbling architecture—that create a thick texture of sound and silence. Sometimes, it is true, this videography is distracting, but I think that Chin’s purpose is to express how culture has mysterious energy that finds various emanations that seep into our subconscious and consciousness. His Cambodian dancers are brilliant manifestations of artists who contend with an urgent mission: to preserve and pass on what has been endangered, covert, and awaiting a palpable transmission to successive generations.

   While contrasted in size and silhouette, compact Phon Sopheap and the taller Yim Savann seem to have their cultural codes in their nerves and bones as they execute the extraordinarily beautiful and sensuous semaphores of Cambodian dance, beginning first with delicate yet intricate finger and wrist movements complemented by bent leg positions and turns that have a hypnotic precision, sharpness, and exoticism. They subtly lure us into the iconography and mystery, their concentration being as much inner as stylized externally. Sometimes they effect open-mouthed grimaces or vibrate their fingers as if under the spell of some invisible force that they have ingested. Both dancers seem connected by invisible threads of cultural continuity as they express (sometimes with a sense of intense urgency) what was once in danger of being lost forever in the terrible destructiveness of the Khmer Rouge.

   The Western dancers alter the Asian pattern by their distinctive body language and style. Louis Laberge-Cote is a powerful dancer, graced with masculine muscularity. Heidi Strauss is adept at modern abstraction. Andrea Nann is all sensuous fluency, and she is the only one for whom the Asian silhouette and choreography are not something merely learned and imposed upon. However, she and her colleagues often seem like tourists in a culture whose codes are a foreign language they have all yet to master. But, perhaps, one of the points of Chin’s piece is that our Western sensibilities erect natural filters that impede the transmission of codes and their imprints. The Western dancers imitate not merely the steps of the Cambodians, but their attitudes and facial expressions as well, and there is poignancy in their open earnestness and willingness to receive the spirits of a new place and tradition. At the end, they appear to harmonize with the Cambodians and become part of a single design.

   The piece is not without aesthetic problems. It runs about 15 minutes longer than it should, repeating motifs and idioms with sometimes diminishing returns. Chin allows for his Western dancers to mingle badly delivered monologues (culled from their own diaries of Cambodian experience) with the dance, and this is sheer folly. When are our dancers and choreographers ever going to learn that they are not actors or even good readers? Recitation, even of the most prosaic kind, is an art form, not a mechanical process, and it requires training, not simply rehearsal. The Canadian trio’s attempts at spoken art are a gross error, but at least these moments are few in number. A more difficult problem is in the Cambodian codes themselves. When the Cambodian dancers speak in their native language, they seem to be having a necessary dialogue about what they are attempting to transmit and preserve. However, this dialogue, and even the precise meaning of their choreography, is foreign to a Western audience, and, so, much of the piece becomes ambiguous, if not downright incomprehensible.  

   And yet, despite my bafflement and rejection of the spoken passages, I am strangely drawn to the piece—perhaps touched by the nobility of its motive to celebrate the human spirit’s power to transcend a tragic past. One of the most affecting moments in Cylla von Tiedemann’s videography is a scene in which a child holds the frail hand of an old, dying relative. Something beautiful is happening here, and it is not just the corporal consolation or tenderness. Something is being passed on from the dying to the living. And then I remember the open mouths and quivering fingers of the Cambodian dancers. Something is, indeed, being passed on from the spirit world to the human, even as old brick crumbles in a temple somewhere or dense traffic passes in the streets or monks pray to the innumerable dead.

photos: Cylla von Tiedemann

pic 1: Peter Chin in Cambodia

pic 2 (l-r); Andrea Nann, Heidi Strauss


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