All the pieces on the " Dance, the Spirit of Cambodia " program, which began a national tour last week at Jacob’s Pillow, ended with formal tableaux or line-ups. Most of them began that way too. Within these artful bracketings, the work emerged as a carefully preserved cultural object, even though some of it was newly composed or arranged.

The elaborate classical traditions of Southeast Asia, as well as the homelier folk traditions, are in constant evolution, gradually adapting to politics and modernism, compensating for the decimated treasuries of once-munificent sponsors. Cambodia’s recent history has been especially devastating to the dance-theater forms that grew up around the royal courts.

In 1971 Americans got to see the last Royal Cambodian company before the Khmer Rouge terror liquidated everything connected with the old regime. Performers in exile tried to carry on at least the training systems and some of the dance forms while the few remaining in Cambodia went into hiding or endured a desperate life in internment camps. When a more democratic government was constituted and Norodom Sihanouk returned to the throne, the arts gained their footing again, but with a drastically depleted core of experienced performers and teachers, and a repertory in tatters.

The Spirit of Cambodia company, now based at the Royal University of Fine Arts in Phnom Penh, is bigger, more richly costumed, and more polished in performing than it was a decade ago on its first US visit, when Cambodia was still in turmoil. Its program covers a broad range, from low comedy to high art, with examples of pure dance, folklore, musical selections, and finally a longish chunk of the pan-Asian dance drama Reamker (Ramayana).

The company doesn’t talk much about its troubled past (four dancers defected during the 1990 tour). And though it provides program notes and accompanying lectures by scholar Toni Shapiro-Phim, the troupe doesn’t offer much background about the persistent interchanges between the Khmer traditions it’s recovering and those of neighboring Thailand, Laos, Indonesia, and India. It doesn’t stress the specific religious influences (Buddhism and Hinduism are the most important) that underlie what now looks like a generalized spirituality. The audience isn’t meant to worry about these issues as it’s treated to the spectacle: serene women gliding along in golden, glittering costumes and headdresses, their arms and fingers curving uncannily back, their toes flexed up, the line of their torsos perfectly sculpted to resemble the bas reliefs at Angkor.

In Robam Apsara, six apsaras — celestial dancers — led by Sok Sokhoeun as the goddess Mera seem to be modeling their gestures and even their bodies for the audience. They face front all the time except when they’re pivoting on one bent leg with the other hooked up behind them or in front. Their fantastic jointless hands are posed in different mudra-like gestures that might be devotional signs or simply ornaments. When princely figures appear in other dances, they’re also played by women, and the gestures move into sweeping, delicate commands and even challenges.

The characters, drawn from Hindu epic and other mythic sources, always seem to be opposing one another: monkeys and mermaids, princes and demons, and, in a theatricalized village piece, a bee and a couple of oxen. But the conflict and the drama are always carefully prescribed. Groups of opponents face each other in lines, approach and circle around together, or duel discreetly by touching sticks a few times. The winners lead the losers out in a wavy, gliding procession. Courting couples perform the same kind of formal approach and reconnoiter. The closest they ever get to a kiss, or even a touch, is a sort of behind-the-back bundling embrace.

Even the clowns, who stamp from foot to foot, tilting their whole bodies, or the monkeys, who squat close to the floor and have a whole repertory for scratching their fleas, don’t get out of line or overstep the specified vocabulary. The monkeys, led by Hanuman, are the acrobats of the troupe, doing cartwheels and somersaults to intimidate their enemies. Great victories or climactic moments in a fight are marked, like action photographs, as the participants lock together in a dramatic pose. One combatant might be balanced on the other’s thigh and perching above him menacingly. But you never see the blow that’s about to be struck.

This formal, pictorial choreography makes the characters seem fixed in their histories, distant and reassuring, the opposite of the turbulent world in which the performers live. Maybe that’s the message of all the classical arts.

Issue Date: August 23-30, 2001