Yes, we do have two Janez Jansas: one originally from Italy, one originally from Croatia, both of them citizens of Slovenia.
There’s a very good reason for all this, but since they asked the international artists to absent themselves from their talk, I’ll keep their explications under wraps for now. They’ll be presenting again at the Singapore Superintense, and I’ll do a recap then.
Whoa! What a way to start the morning: Tarek’s performing his “UN-DRUM” series: “This is a crossing between contemporary music, electronic music, but also electro-acoustic music and noise music,” he says.
Behind the console, fingers fiddling with dials, blare of traffic, arms flaring out to catch the air above his theremins, warping noise and backbeat bass, bare lanky feet stepping out, returning to focus on his laptop for seconds before he busts out another move, hair swinging, and recorded voices of men and women in Mandarin, yelling Mao Zhu Xi Wan Shui…
He’s finished. We applaud, wildly. Oh wait, he isn’t finished: there’s a second movement. He mops his forehead with a white towel, and launches back in.
After the second round of applause, he stops.
Tarek: I am sorry. I did in the speaker. Like Jimi Hendrix. I buy you a new one.
It’s the second time this has happened, we discover. The last time round was in Sweden, also with KS. It’s a curse, I tell you.
Tarek: I asked Keng Sen to ask to speak to you this way because I use sound and I speak through sound. And second because the best way to see what I do is to hear what i do and talk about it. if I show you a video it’s not the same.
He opens the floor for questions.
Chath: I think you’re amazing.
Tarek: That’s not a question.
Chath: But i’ve never seen anything like it.
The work is 60% composed, 40% improvised, and he breaks down the whole narrative for the Cambodians: how improv was vitally improtant in the art and music of the ’60s, as it was a reaciton to break out of the stodgy structured forms of classical music and early contemporary music
Tarek: And I am starting to go back to form again. Now we are linking back to new forms of writing that use both form and improvisation. So it’s very much form and very much improvised.
It’s a really good presentation. He leaves pauses in all the right places for the translators, explains the three steps of his composition: 1) recording, 2) music and performance, 3) software and hardware engineering (“These 3 elements form a triangle and I can go from one corner to another”), and his physical tools of a) distance, b) faders, c) pressure, plus the 40 machines inside his software, and no absolute control, so he’s forced into randomness:
Tarek: I have many accidents happening, really a lot. And what I like about this is I don’t have 100% control of it. In other works I have computer starts to play all the sounds. And I try and make a composition out of it. When I dont know the reaction for the computer I have to be very attentive. And I like it because it’s going back to a point of hyper-attention.
And then there’s the background to the piece – he explains why he used audio excerpts from Cultural Revolution trials of musicians, composers and opera stars in China; how that period parallels not only the Khmer Rouge but also the Nasserist era of pan-Arabism (and here he explains the difference between Arabs and Muslims), how entire communal memories were erased for the sake of sectarian interests in the years that followed, and a Chinese text helps to negotiate the fact that he’s refusing to take sides in the local sectarian: neither Hezbollah nor Muslim Brothers.
And the personal background: it’s based on a personal experience when he was arrested and tortured in a war for three days in 2006. (“It’s okay,” he says with utter nonchalance.)
Tarek: And during this experience I got beaten on my ear and now I don’t hear very well with this one (points to left ear). So I can play very loud. And it’s very nice, because the speaker blew up. The speaker next to this ear.
As proud as he is of the machines, however, he wants to make sure the kids know that they’re not everything. They can bring in their audio archive clips on the 10th and he’ll show them how it’s done.
Don’t think it’s just me, he says. You can do this yourself.
I’ll have to recap everything soon. But it’s been pretty awesome so far: Tarek gave a workshop this morning, followed by the Janez Jansas. Now I’m listening to Jecko: he’s got the students on their feet and is teaching them his Papuan kangaroo pose.
OMG! We’ve just found out that one of the people behind the krama documentary, a 19 year-old economics student named Sai, is also an action film director!
A year and a half ago he got together with his friends (some of whom can perfect any fighting method after watching a movie clip of it for half an hour), and basically decided to make a kickass 15-minute movie about, well, kicking ass and taking names.
Yeah, there’s some back-story about a gang kidnapping the hero’s two sisters, but it’s the fight sequences which are what really matter. Daring angles, slow-mo, brutal choreography… This is the kind of movie every teenage boy wants to see, as well every one of us who has a teenage boy inside of us (oh dear, that sounds unnecessarily risque…).
It started out with Kannitha (filmmaker) proposing we take a walk after Bophana. A big group of us ended up meandering: Belle (dancer), Dara (interpreter), Nara (interpreter), Tarek (sound artist), Hu Fang (writer/curator), Manuel (choreographer), Hafiz (choreographer), Paul (observer), Sai (filmmaker) and me.
We passed the monument to independence…
… the casino (they had traditional music to mark the lucky draw)…
… and finally ended up at a rather nice Thai place where they actually quote the prices in reals instead of US dollars. (I didn’t save any money, though, ‘cos I ordered crab. Yum yum yum.)
And in between courses, Sai mentions he’s made three or four movies so far, and Manuel demands that he show us one of ’em. So he whips out his Apple Snow Leopard and we get this really cool action flick, which we end up turning around at the end of the dinner so the other side of the table can watch.
Apparently a lot of the fight sequences were coordinated by consensus decision, and the whole thing took only 15 days to film. Ah, brotherhood.
He’s tried to send the piece for festivals, but no fish have bitten yet. We all want to screen him somewhere now. (And I know it’s because of the language barrier, but the subtitles are a hoot, too.)
… but I’m afraid it was pretty tough going, watching everyone’s films. Afternoon sessions are always difficult, but when you try to squeeze 58 people into a tiny AV room and screen short films in a language half of us don’t understand? Accompanied by lengthy explanations in Khmer, with English translations we can’t hear because we’re sitting too far back in the room?
Difficult. Very difficult. Add lunch beforehand and the fact that two air-conditioners couldn’t keep up with our stuffy body heat, and then maybe you’ll understand why I completely slept through a graphic revenge documentary on the Killing Fields.
The students involved in these projects
The ones that stick in my mind are:
1) Tith Kannitha and Oun Batham’s documentary on the versatile methods of tying the krama scarf
2) Sorn Setpheap and and So Chakrya’s footage of people at the war crimes trials reacting to images of rock’n’roll dancing before the War
3) Koh Rathany, Chan Lida and Tith Narith’s piece based on propaganda video of the Khmer Rouge, celebrating the joyousness and harmony of the Communist regime through dance and army marches. They showed the clips to people under the age of 18, who mused that whoa, the Khmer Rouge period couldn’t have been so bad, and then showed this to their parents, who wept to realise their children didn’t know the truth about this suffering. (The history of the genocides still hasn’t found its way into textbooks.)
Wow. This visit was an education in heartbreak.
You really wanna hear it? Well, it’s like this.
Daravut and Ingrid started Reyum in 1997. It used to be an Internet cafe, so they had just one wall for their displays – but they were young and energetic then, and they were determined to create a memory bank of Cambodia, employing a team of full-time researchers to archive the culture of the land (not even on a show-to-show basis, but all the bloody time). They had an art school for kids to get a sense of contemporary art, and a printing press where they put books out (children’s books, reference books, whatever), in English, French and Khmer – one of the few Khmer presses around at the time. They even got African artists and South American architects to come and lecture and teach, breaking the hegemonic paths KS talked about before. The TV station came and covered that, too.
All this they did at a loss. They’d been given money by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Prince Klaus network, so they could pay for their electricity and food and worry about the moral quandaries of teaching art and design to kids when there was little chance of getting a job out of these skills, and also insist on quality, quality in everything they presented for display and consumption. Phnom Penh deserved that.
Also, people were curious about Cambodia then. “10 years ago it was enough to be a career artist,” he says. “A curator would come and say, we need 10 Cambodian artists.”
Then in 2009, the Rockefeller Foundation ran dry because of the economic crisis. Ingrid also passed away.
And since then, Daravut’s been unsure of whether he can continue the group. They’ve closed down the art school. Narrowed the researchers down to four part-timers. Put together the exhibition on measurements, which he doesn’t actually feel is very good. No plans for another exhibition after this. No knowledge of whether Reyum will survive into 2011, either.
Daravut: A lot of people come and say this is good, but we feel very isolated. And I feel very emotional because we have reached a point where we might cease to operate. We have to find a different formula, less expensive, to pay for operations.
“Personally I’ve reached a cycle,” he says. 12 years since its founding, he doesn’t know if he should carry on.
This is the first area of Cambodian culture that’s looking despairing rather than hopeful as we’re stepping into the country. From KS’s intro, I’m not even sure if he was expecting this.
If you’re in Cambodia, stop by their place. Try and support them. God knows they need it.
Show’n’tell time. The Amrita kids show off their stuff.
KS says it’s the first time he’s seen them go through their warm-ups in a large group – usually it’s just one by one. We’re doing this ‘cos they described how they play the monkey role, the male role, the female role in court dance, folklore dance in their intros. Us ignorant barbarians have little idea what this means.
In the midst of rising and falling and stretching and chanting ting-tong-ching, the students describe their experiences: how teachers would rise and strike them with sticks if they wobbled while balanced on one foot.
Then Hafiz stages an intervention: he rolls across the floor in a continuous circle. Later he explains that it’s because he didn’t want the kids to feel alone on stage: they’re all in this together, faced with the stress of having to expose themselves.
And of course, Sopheap (a student at Amrita) stages an intervention to the intervention.
He’s a Ramayana monkey, scratching himself and puzzling over the horizontal giant. Together, they make something… abstract.
Afterwards, a brief discussion breaks out about gender: in contemporary practice of traditional dance, males and females are almost completely segregated – there are all-male masked Ramayanas which have quite different conventions from all-female masked Ramayanas. Often with youth troupes, both Rama and Sita are played by girls, but Hanuman and the rest of his monkey army are played by boys (though in the older days, even women played the monkey roles). Belle, one of the students, was actually switched from female to male roles once she grew too tall to be paired with any other girls. Once, they tried to stage a Ramayana with a female Sita and a male Rama. Riots nearly broke out.
Fred, the head of Amrita, explains that this is one of the reasons contemporary dance is sought after: it gives the young men and women a space where they can perform together.
But there are no contemporary dance companies here, only freelance projects so far, he tells us. Hopefully, we can set the foundations to change that.
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.
… but the table setup was way too long, and two thirds of us had no idea what the other third was saying. Even after we rearranged the tables and pleaded with the others to up their volume.
Chatted instead. Tucked into mutton curry, tofu, and cauliflower.
I spent most of my time talking to Manuel and Mustafa. Manuel told me all about being 14 years old during the Romanian Revolution, news on the TV and machine-gun fire on the streets outside filled with incredible crowds of people and him being overjoyed that he would no longer have to attend rehearsals in praise of Ceausescu dressed as a giant snowflake. (He’d only started learning ballet because his parents thought it might be a good skill to have if he wanted to defect.) Also notes on Romanian dance and cinema, Singaporean capitalist dictatorship, and disorienting levels of Cambodian friendliness.
I didn’t mention in the last mail, did I, that Tarek has Cambodian ’60s rock-‘n’-roll on old vinyl CDs? He’s got the mp3s around so he can donate copies to Bophana.
Slept in!
Got up!
Got lost! (Everyone in Hotel Anise was supposed to rendezvous with the Villa Langka people at 3:30, but we had some dodgy directions.)
Got found! On to Meta House, home of Bophana Audiovisual Resource Centre!
We’re given an intro by volunteer visual archive manager Gaetan Crespel, from France. Bophana’s set up by star national filmmaker Rithy Panh to:
1) archive images, sound and video of the country over the years as “an attempt to recreate a contemporary memory of Cambodia”, open to all.
2) train younger filmmakers. It’s because of this aim that the government donated the entire plot of land to them, since it’s in their interests to create a national film industry. (The French embassy did the building renovations, though.)
We’ll be working on aim (2) for the next few days, but this afternoon was pretty much devoted to a showcase of the archive’s digitised treasures. Scans of Rodin sketches, home movies, Apsara TV footage.
A few amazing artefacts:
a) “Danseuses Cambodgiennes du Roi”, B&W footage of royal court dancers taken in 1899 by a delegation of cameramen on behalf of the Lumiere Brothers.
b) A contemporary documentary about the animist/Muslim Cham minority of Islam by Agnes de Feo: “Strange Islam”.
c) the collection’s first animated artefact: “Little Boy Drinking Bad Water”, a public service announcement instructing us to drink “safe water” rather than bucolically drawn well water, which will give our kids fevers and drive our husbands to pray to ancestors for forgiveness (seriously, there was super animation here: a rudimentary CAT scan of the kid’s digestive system morphs into a surrealist dreamscape of bacteria as shape-shifting, psychedelic beasts, followed by a graphic [yet cute!] image of him squatting in the fields spurting out diarrhoea).
d) loads of black and white propaganda/documentary works taken by the Khmer Rouge itself,
e) “Joie de Vivre” this super sexy comedy from the ’60s, filmed in French and Khmer, written and directed by King Norodom Sihanouk HIMSELF (because if you’re king, you get to do whatever the hell you like), featuring sleazy detectives, bedroom scenes with zaftig ladies, a casino with cards and poker tables and chap ji kee and an opium hookah and men in suits and women in beehive hairdos and ’60s skirts and samfoos, and an evil faithless vixen doing a naked booty call to her secret lover (okay, they’re in bed covering up their naughty bits, but damn, she’s hella stacked, and is she is a princess and he a prince or something?) and then they’re in a restaurant for their secret assignation, oh did I mention her husband got clapped in irons in a sting operation the night before, and then they’re all doin’ ROCK ‘N’ ROLL with these scarlet zoot-suited saxophonists and guitar-players and a man and woman just swinging up there, all these young people just shakin’ and rattlin’ and rollin’ on the wooden-panelled floor in broad daylight..
… Eszter noted later on that while we’re watching such hedonism, we’re haunted by the knowledge that all these beautiful young people almost certainly were killed in the round-ups of Year Zero: they were the francophones, the musicians, the intellectuals, the wearers of spectacles.
And KS said, yes, in fact during the war crimes trials he appealed to the Bophana students to create interventions, and one of them brought out clips from this film and the older people began talking about the class divide of the time: they never went to rock parties, “this was the rich people, we couldn’t do this. we were doing folk-dance.” And the whole revolution that happened later was in part a reaction of the impoverished to the excesses of the elites.
Gaetan says there were about 350 movies made in Cambodia before the Khmer Rouge takeover. They’ve recovered 30 so far. Every time they find something on the market, they have to check back with the creators to see if they have the originals. And if they don’t, they leave that option open: maybe the original will be found again.
To access the films right now, you’ve gotta turn up at the Center itself (it’s the street of Cambodian cinema, he says, with the Ministry of Culture and the film recruitment centres nearby). Sure, they could upload everything on the Internet, but they can’t afford the bandwidth, and with everyone searching, the system would crash.
Coffee break now. Back to hotel. Dinner at 8.
FCP 09/10 