The inside story of Cambodia’s first gay dance company
In 2015, choreographer Prumsodun Ok formed an all male, gay-identified Khmer dance company in his living room. Now he finds himself the face of the sacred art’s inclusive future.
Prumsodun Ok never intended to found Cambodia’s first gay dance company, let alone spark a national movement. “It was completely accidental,” he says.
It was 2015, and he was teaching dance in Los Angeles, not far from Long Beach, California, where he had been raised by refugees of the Cambodian genocide. Ok was burned out, uninspired and stuck. “I felt that I was getting older, and that I hadn’t even seen the world yet,” he remembers.
Then, unexpectedly, Ok received a grant from the MAP Fund for a Khmer dance project, Beloved, he had nearly forgotten about. The project was inspired by an Angkorian fertility ritual dating back to the 13th century, during which the king would climb to the top of the temple at night to make love to the spirit of the land, ensuring rainfall and a fertile harvest season.
“I was thinking about how beautiful it is to have a love so virtuous that it makes the rain fall, a love so powerful that it ensures the life of all society,” Ok says. “And I wanted to cast this history of ritual lovemaking into the bodies of dancing gay men.”
Gay love had never been depicted in Khmer dance until Ok, a TED Fellow, first did so for a project back in 2008. For centuries, Khmer dance was dominated by women, and even today it is unusual for men to dance. But Ok believed that Khmer dance had room to be more inclusive. In fact, Ok believed this ancient art desperately needed to evolve if was to even survive. And so in 2015, Ok moved from Los Angeles to Phnom Penh to play his part.
The history of Khmer classical dance is a complicated one. It was developed more than 1,000 years ago as an offering to the gods to ensure the fall of rain. And while the movement began among the village people of Cambodia, it soon became an artistic expression associated with the royal Khmer palace, where dancers performed sacred Khmer choreographies for the king.
“Dancers were offered to temples where they were seen as living bridges between heaven and earth,” Ok says. “They were messengers between the people and the gods.”
Then the revolution came. In the 1970s, the Khmer Rouge, a group of radical communists, overthrew the Khmer Republic and carried out an unimaginably brutal genocide against any and all of their perceived enemies — not only those associated with the former government, but also ethnic minorities, academics, intellectuals and artists. In its quest to erase everything associated with elite Khmer culture, the Khmer Rouge killed off a staggering 90% of Khmer dance artists.
“Imagine the immense amount of knowledge and number of singular voices that were lost in the genocide,” Ok says. “This loss continues to affect Cambodia and Cambodian people today.”
Since the war, Cambodia and the Cambodian diaspora have continued to rally around Khmer dance as a national symbol. “In a sense, the war spread Khmer dance all over the world. The dance has become a way to remember, to reconnect, and to rebuild,” Ok says. Still, he fears for the future of Khmer dance. “If we’re not careful, this art form could disappear,” he warns. “My responsibility as an artist is to ensure that it can have the highest form of life. Preserving by expanding upon the art form is my responsibility.”
Queering Khmer dance in Cambodia would be no small challenge. While same-sex activity is legal in the country and former King Norodom Sihanouk has even voiced support for same-sex marriage, LGBTQ individuals still commonly face harassment and discrimination. Ok says that when he decided to move back to Cambodia to work on Beloved, his friends feared for his safety, one even telling him, “If anyone wants to kill you, they can do it for very little money.”
Still, Ok was determined. But he didn’t yet have a cast. Where did one even find gay Khmer dancers in Phnom Penh? Ok put out a casting call for an audition at a circus studio in the city center, expecting two or three dancers to show up. Twelve came to the audition. Ok decided to train them all.
“After a month and a half of rehearsal, I looked at them and thought, ‘Whoa, they look like a real company. I think Cambodia’s first gay dance company just formed in my living room,’” Ok says. “This was the moment in which my dreams got bigger, and at the same time they got sharper and more realistic. My sense of purpose in life became higher and fuller.”
After months of rehearsal in his apartment, Ok and his dancers had their premiere as a company in August 2016 at the Department of Performing Arts in Phnom Penh. The doors opened an hour early and within minutes, the auditorium was completely packed with an audience representing Phnom Penh’s great diversity — young students and older artists, expats and Cambodians, gay and straight. The show was a smash. Afterwards, the crowd gathered to discuss everything from masculinity and misogyny within the gay community to the complex relationship between tradition and innovation.
“There are people who look at things I do and say, ‘That’s not traditional and therefore it’s not Khmer,’” Ok says. “What they don’t realize is that tradition isn’t static. Tradition is something that’s always moving, something that’s always evolving.”
There are now seven full-time dancers in the company, four of which were at that initial audition two years ago. Their experience dancing with Ok, some for the very first time, has undeniably changed the course of their lives. “All of a sudden these young men are in the major newspapers,” he says. “They’re flying on a plane for the first time. They are on stages they never thought they’d ever get a chance to be on.”
Ok himself has also experienced such a transformation. “At first I thought, ‘What am I doing? Is it the right move to come back to Cambodia? I’m jumping into the fire,’” he says. “But fire is interesting. Fire has this ability to destroy something, or to transform it. It’s been a process of transformation for me ever since I came back. People saw that I was a good teacher. They saw the transformation in my dancers. And they saw the transformation in me, too.”
Currently, Ok is developing an interdisciplinary journal to give young Khmer people access to groundbreaking voices and ideas. He hopes this will help them envision new possibilities for Cambodia. And in February 2018, his company will be in residence at the new Java Creative Café in Phnom Penh, which will have a theater where they can rehearse, expand training opportunities for youth and perform for the tourist market.
Even as Ok continues his work pushing the art of Khmer dance forward, he says he is always looking back to the spiritual roots of Khmer dance for guidance.
“In ancient days, the wishes and hopes of the people were expressed in the bodies of dancers, and the will of the gods was delivered through their bodies as well,” Ok says. “For me, this is the very vital role that the artist plays in our society: the ability to make the rain fall, the ability to ensure the well-being of others, the ability to ensure life.”
The TED Fellows program hand-picks young innovators from around the world to raise international awareness of their work and maximize their impact.
