Dali House

Culture in modern Cambodia is a delicate thing, as is much else, understandably, in that shaken, bewildered coultry. Mighty Angkor itself looks like it will easily hang on for another thousand years, but it’s chipped, part swallowed once more by the jungle, and missing a lot of pieces.

Not all those pieces have been disintegrated by weapons or stolen and taken abroad. Many are in the National Museum in Phnom Penh, but when I was there in 1994 a lot of statuary was piled in dusty stacks or strewn about as though the figures were waiting for a bus that might not come.

So it’s nice that Rodin’s come along.

I say “nice”, because it’s an odd perspective on Cambodia that he created in 1906. He made 150 drawings of traditional Khmer dancers who performed in France that year, and 40 of the works are on display at the Phnom Penh museum through February 11.

It’s nice that the French have not only arranged the centenary exhibition but paid for a wing of the museum to be renovated with temperature and humidity control, a first for steamy Cambodia, so that the drawings on paper are safe. The French controlled everything but the humidity in the country for nearly a century, finally relinquishing its former colony in 1953. The renovation cost all of $200,000.

In Cambodia today, you don’t get people dancing in the old style at the drop of a hat or the striking up of a familiar traditional air. Thais do that, but in Thailand the dance is pervasive. It’s on TV and at festivals all the time, and generations of Thais have been taught the basic moves.

The Khmer kings reserved the art form for themselves, and it was a troupe “belonging” to King Sisowath that came to entertain his French masters at the 1906 Colonial Exposition in Marseille. The monarch came along too, his first visit to the land that owned his land.

The International Herald Tribune reported last week that Auguste Rodin had a ticket for the president’s gala garden party that July, where the dancers of the Royal Ballet of Cambodia were to perform, but he wasn’t wearing a tie, so, even as famous as he was by then, he was barred from entering!

The sculptor was livid at the snub, but managed to discover what it was that had all of France raving when he saw the dancers perform a few days later in the Bois de Bologne. The young women with bobbed hair and artful movements danced straight into his heart.

“I contemplated them in ecstasy,” he said, and followed them back to Marseille.
“I would have followed them all the way to Cairo!”

As seen in the photo at the top, he got individual dancers to pose for him, but rather than capturing precisely their crucial gestures, the IHT points out, the colonialist Rodin transposed them into Western myth, placing small objects in their hands and giving the drawings the ochre and blue washes of an Italian fresco.

God knows what he was thinking, but it had nothing to do with the Khmer history they were playing out for him. It has to be remembered too, I suppose, that Rodin, as supremely gifted as he was at capturing movement, didn’t know dance like Degas knew dance. Here Rodin had found his own ballet dancers, and from there the tangent was all of his own making.

Rodin paid no heed at all to the exacting, unvarying, meaning-rich movements, and the result is today “completely unrecognisable by Cambodians”, Christina Buley-Uribe of the Rodin Museum in Paris told the IHT. The unfinished quality “strikes some Cambodians as ‘lazy’ or even ‘ugly’,” the newspaper says.

The IHT found a former member of the Royal Ballet at the exhibition’s opening. “If you look to the position of the arm, it’s not correct,” said Soth Sam On, 77. “It’s too high. But the energy is there.

“For me as a dancer, my teacher wanted me to be exact, to finish. The drawings have loose lines, but they are very beautiful.”

Soth Sam On had never heard of Rodin before the show, and neither had Khun Samen, director of the National Museum. Once the exhibition is over, he said, the new air-conditioned hall can be used for conferences and film screenings. Maybe there’ll even be more art from overseas.