In collaboration with SafeSpaceBTB
What better way to end our season than with a topic that captures what we've learned on our travels. Our incredible guest this week, Prumsodun Ok, founded the first gay Khmer classical dance company in Cambodia, subverting and reinterpreting the strict gender norms practiced in this traditional art form.
Prum is a gay man who grew up in the United States, the child of Cambodian refugees who fled the country during the Khmer Rouge regime. Having lived there most of his life, training and teaching at the Khmer Arts Academy, he was given the opportunity to return to Cambodia and contribute significantly to the preservation of classical dance by creating a company, Prumsodun Ok & NATYARASA. With this, he hopes to train generations of dedicated dancers, while providing a safe space for queer men to find purpose and livelihood in revitalizing a profession revered among Cambodians, and thus helping to increase respect and visibility for the queer community in the country.
Khmer classical dance follows an ancient lineage of thousands of years in the animistic ritual dances of the Khmer, even before the advent of Buddhism. This dance is thought to have been a method of asking the gods for their blessings by offering the bodies of the dancers as vessels for the wishes of the community. Through dance, a channel of communication is opened between the community and the divine by the establishment of an harmonious synchronization.
The dancers represent the forces and deities of nature. This is reflected in the four basic hand gestures that represent the life cycle of a tree, from seed to growth to blossom to fruit to seed again. Students must spend years training their fingers and bodies to become hyper-flexible, resulting in seemingly inhuman poses that contort the body into pronounced curves to represent the fluidity and dynamism of life.
With the rise of the empire and the advent of Buddhism, the dance evolved to represent the myths of creation and to serve the function of ensuring the health of the kingdom, becoming a fundamental aspect of entertainment and religion in court life, and taking on a more structured, formal note. With the decline of royalty, however, the dance became an open symbol of national identity in the formation of modern Cambodia.
An important component of classical Khmer dance is the representation of the balance between the feminine and masculine. In its royal form, the dancers have clearly defined gender roles, but we cannot know for sure if gender non-conforming roles were simply erased from history.
There is evidence, for example, that during the colonial period the costumes were changed to more "modest" ones, covering the bare breasts of the female performers, in an attempt to use the dance as a national symbol that could be palatable to Western audiences. At the same time, strict gender roles were developed for the whole of society in order to create a national image in line with colonial views of what a modern nation should be, and this naturally affected how traditional dance should look and be practiced. Over time, the blessing dances, due to their soft nature, became exclusive to women.
As a result, there is very little historical evidence of queer involvement in this art form due to revisions of the practice starting with the French occupation. However, based on similar historical traditions in the region and the Khmer origin of the word kthuey as a third gender category, we could safely assume a role similar to that of the Bissu dancers we encounter in Indonesia or the kathoey dancers in Thailand, as a bridge between the masculine and feminine.
As Cambodian researcher Annelise Ayuravann Ratner concludes:
“With clearly defined and codified roles for male and female performers, what is packaged as traditional in mainstream representations of Khmer classical dance today presents a version of Cambodian art and history that has written queerness out."
During the Khmer Rouge regime, as we explored earlier, historical revisionism included the destruction of records that contradicted a vision of Cambodia as a nation of disciplined peasants, and this included the traditional arts, and with them the erasure of any written evidence of queer involvement in ritual and dance.
Over 90% of all classical dancers were killed, threatening the practice with total extinction. But a few survived, mostly by fleeing to other countries. One of the largest Cambodian diaspora communities formed in the United States, where Sophiline Cheam Shapiro founded the Khmer Arts Academy, where Prum learned to dance. Eventually, he moved to Cambodia to help revive this ancient practice that had been almost completely lost.
Growing up, Prum was always more interested in the femenine aspect of classical dance. He was perhaps lucky to have grown up close to the Cambodian community to grow an interest in the traditional dance form, while also being in contact with the queer rights movements in California. This allowed him to see no contradiction in the inclusion of male bodies in the feminine roles of classical Khmer dance, but rather a way to breathe new life into this struggling art form.
If the main function of Khmer classical dance is to reflect the harmony of nature and represent the cycle of life, how could it ever be true and honest without including the queerness that has always been present in reality?
Queering a traditional art form, then, is not simply an act of confrontation or complete reinterpretation. Queering can be a form of liberation, in this case from the colonial and nationalist influences that revised the past to create a tradition in line with cultural and political interests that benefited from the strict binary of gender roles. But even when an art form emerges from this tradition, queering can have the effect of opening it to reflect a community's true diversity, reinforcing and inviting new understandings of the core concepts preserved in its practice.
In the same breath, queering can mean preserving and transforming, decolonizing and recovering a forgotten history, liberating and renewing to construct another possible future...
It is our sincere hope that this season of intense exploration in South and Southeast Asia has contributed a little more to the queering of your perspectives.
References:
Annelise Ayuravann Ratner (2022) Embodying Tradition: Khmer Classical Dance and Images of Queer Presence and Possibility. Modern Southeast Asia, Feb 5th. https://seasia.yale.edu/embodying-tradition-khmer-classical-dance-and-images-queer-presence-and-possibility
Courtney Escoyne (2019) Why Prumsodun OK Founded Cambodia’s First Gay Dance Company in His Living Room. Dance Magazine, June 29th https://www.dancemagazine.com/prumsodun-ok-natyarasa/
Kem Vichet (2022). Common misconceptions and the overlap between anti-gender and anti-gay rights sentiment in Cambodia. Global Action for Trans Equality, Oct 14th. https://gate.ngo/common-misconceptions-and-the-overlap-between-anti-gender-and-anti-gay-rights-sentiment-in-cambodia/
Pat de Brún (2019) Queering Kampuchea: LGBT Rights Discourse and Postcolonial Queer Subject Formation in Cambodian Queer Politics. PhD Thesis, University of London https://uploads-ssl.webflow.com/61013c7e900a3f8e370b0cb3/632070231a83dd44a1d38f21_Queering-Kampuchea.pdf
Paul Cravath (1986) The Ritual Origins of the Classical Dance Drama of Cambodia. Asian Theatre Journal, 3(2). https://doi.org/10.2307/1124400
Vanna Nauk (2020). An Oral History of Transgender/Gender-NonConforming Cambodian American Siblings. MA Thesis. San Francisco State University. https://scholarworks.calstate.edu/downloads/cn69m969f
Pictures credit: Nobuyuki Arai
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