We’re here at Amrita Performing Arts Centre!!! About 40 of us crammed into a dance studio, and more to come!
And by golly, there’s wireless! Stay tuned.
UPDATE: There were about 58 of us, all told: Amrita students, Bophana students, guides. KS gives the intro, about how TheatreWorks came in 1992, monitored as part of a government tour, in streets full of people legless from landmines.
KS: There was constant sense of crisis in the air. There was the UN running around, a lot of foreign presence, foreign aid. We were entering into a country that at night there was totally darkness, no streetlights, there were accidents, and when the police are out they just shoot. The tour guide who was bringing us through Angkor was saying like, “I’m only 20 years old, but i feel my life is already over.”
At that point he hadn’t an inkling that we’d be gathered together in an air-conditioned room full of mirrors, where half of us were artists who’d never even known life under the Khmer Rouge.
We do brief introductions – this takes an hour, because of translations. And it turns out that KS was quite deliberate in picking out a multi-culti group of artists from across the world: it started when he was at a festival in Rio de Janeiro and realised there were no other Asian artists there, he said. Western European and North American governments (and increasingly, Japanese and Korean and Chinese governments too) are willing to sponsor their artists to travel to distant climes to disseminate the word of Art. Artists from other climes – Eastern Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia – are seldom so lucky.
KS: There are some corridors of art circulation which are not used. sometimes they’re not even there. And we are moving in ways which are not so usual, because we’re not moving in the direction of touring productions.
A coffee break.
FCP 09/10 
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