Choreographers in training

This showing is going to be much more classical than the previous.

For the others, the kids have had three or four days to put things together, work on them, and what comes out is definitely 'western' with a classical twist, but with just an hour or two to think, set, and practice their pieces, they've had to draw on their training much more heavily.

It's not a bad thing, it's just interesting to notice. I've also been watching how they work with their dancers, how they watch, how they structure things, and it's really quite fascinating.

Across the board, the thing I think is the coolest is that almost everyone has taken real ownership of their work. Usually they ask for notes; this time they haven't. They ask for music with authority. When their piece is being performed, they sit in front and watch very attentively. Sometimes in the breaks, they work to fix things, they ask their dancers to practice.

They are just starting as choreographers, and they've had no time, so naturally their pieces are raw, unfinished. They are just sketches, not really dances yet. They are fairly long -- most of them, in my opinion, too long. If we had more workshop time, I'd like to see them develop, become more precise, and clarify what everything is doing and why it's there.

Some of the pieces are very strong, and I can see the budding choreographers. I'm not really sure how to describe it, but it's a way of working with the movement, a kind of experimentation, the way they structure it and think about it. Their pieces are complex and original.

Maybe it's just that they live and die with their pieces. Sitting in the front, I can see them moving with their dancers, breathing with them, so inside the piece they can't help themselves but move with it. I know that feeling. I've been there, many times now.

Some of them are more clearly dancers, and there's nothing wrong with that. Or maybe it's just that they aren't choreographers yet. One of them, the baby of the class (sixteen, where most everyone is at least twenty) and also my most faithful student (I think he's missed two classes since the first workshop), is an incredible dancer, and his piece is one of the better ones, but he's had to fight to get it there. He has a ton of ideas, but he's not super confident in asserting himself yet, and he hasn't quite figured out how best to communicate what he wants from the dancers. I think he's taken the most time to try and iron out the kinks.  He'll learn, or he'll be a stunning dancer.

Either way, tomorrow is the showing and it's my very last workshop at CLA, which is kind of sad. I'll miss the kids a lot, and am definitely hoping to see them again for my next project...

Happy Birthday MJ

PDC has to take a moment to acknowledge its inspirations...well, mine at least.

If Michael Jackson was still alive, he would be 54 today.

Last year, for my thesis, I spent a long time with MJ, watching music videos on repeat, comparing with his back up dancers; I read a 650 page biography and his autobiography, watched This Is It and other random videos, and read several dozen articles. Of course I knew about him, but I had never really watched him dance before then.

And then I spent a whole semester doing so.

Because I'm posting this, I'm sure you know how I feel, but let me just say: he was (and is) the most incredible dancer I have ever seen, with the ability to move without moving and walk without weight. There is no comparison, and especially not in the influence he had. Everyone knows who he is, and how he moved. You start a move and everyone says, oh yeah, Michael Jackson.

So happy birthday, Mr. Jackson. You inspire me.

Tuesday Night Chatter

I was expecting to be running until eight o'clock tonight, but got the evening off, which I appreciate. This week is so busy that my biggest issue is trying to figure out when the heck I can get to the market and replenish my fruit supply, which is seriously low and therefore means I have nothing to eat for breakfast. My latest plot is an early morning run tomorrow, though I may have a half hour -- in which it will hopefully NOT be monsooning -- when I can go.

Tonight I'm distracted, for some reason everything is occupying my attention and I somehow just found myself spending twenty minutes on the "Glee Wikipedia" catching up on Season three, which I didn't watch because I thought it was too ridiculous. I was definitely right about that much, and I can't believe I just admitted on the internet that I did that, but hey. It could be worse.

I always knew that paying September's rent was going to be the most difficult, two months of getting my feet under me and digging into my still-quite-limited savings, but I am happy to announce (something else that I'm not quite sure why I'm putting on the internet) that Mission: Not Getting Kicked Out After Two Months will be a success, and I will still have (some) savings left. Hooray for not going broke in foreign countries without return plane tickets, eh?

The six week slump -- which I think lasted from a month to six weeks -- has dissipated, or maybe it was washed away by the monsoons. I'm interested again, and totally hooked by this project to get my students on stage, performing their own work, somewhere where a lot of people will come watch them. I'm going to get a Khmer tutor ASAP and will start on a mission to learn enough of the language to run a rehearsal, besides how to talk to the fruitseller at the market.

See, I know I could get away with not doing it, which is probably precisely why I've decided now is the best time to get into it. I could just get translators, or talk to the students with the better English -- but that's not okay. So, I need a tutor who can teach me all the dance words I want to know.

I had to pause there in order to do dishes, as I don't have time to do them tomorrow and someone's coming for dinner, which means the apartment has to be at least reasonably presentable.

Maybe you're wondering what in the world I'm doing to be so busy, but it's just that this week is the only week I work in the mornings and teach workshops in the afternoon, and have a couple make up lessons for the private tutoring. It's just a bit busy, but next week should be normal.

I can't really talk about my students enough. This week has been really interesting: they are beginning choreographers, and because there are so damn many of them, I can only give them forty five minutes to set their pieces, so they are definitely sketches. A little clumsy, a little more classical than their other work that they had three plus days to work on, but still very well thought out, and I think the fact that they've been working so much on them means they're taking it seriously. They could certainly use some workshop time, and as with anything, you have to practice to be good and they're learning on the fly.

Today was a quiet class, though most everyone had filtered in by the end, and everyone was a little goofy, laughing a lot. For not really speaking each other's language, we understand the jokes very well. I'm really going to miss them -- and here I was at the beginning, kvetching about having to teach every day and what not. No, to be honest I'm crazily proud of them. I've already started plotting to get a few of them to come dance for me in Paris.

It's really because of them that I'm excited about being here again, that and things, inexplicably and from the strangest places, are falling at my feet. Teaching the Thriller dance, which had been given to someone else before they cancelled, now a translating project where someone I've met once recommended me and involves interviews with past Royal Ballet members...yes, and I'm taking dance classes again. I tell you, not dancing just makes me hate the world, hence why it is better for everyone that I spend my entire life doing it. Flawless logic right there.

Still, it's definitely cool that when I ask "No really, why am I here?" I have an answer. I knew all along that asking the question meant creating the answer, which is precisely what I'm doing.

I have to make a decision sooner or later about this market trip. I think I'll probably just hope it's not raining in the middle of the day and not get up at seven in the morning, which, considering my sleepiness this afternoon, could become an issue.

It is probably just wishful thinking, but I think it might be getting cooler. Except in the middle of the day, where I am invariably on my bike going somewhere and sweating. Then it is not colder at all, which leads me to believe that it is just wishful thinking, and just because people are bizarrely going back to school does not mean it's fall.

An update on the bike, in closing -- I have decided that my rear brakes need tightening, but then in pursuing this line of thought discovered that the brakes are somehow attached to the wheel and not those little pincer things you usually see. It's on the other side from the chain and has some strange spring. Needless to say, I am quite skeptical of the engineering and am still trying to figure out where I might go in order to get this fixed, and if in doing so I run the real risk of exploding the brakes entirely.

Which would, I think you'd agree, be a serious problem.

Biking the monsoons, for real this time

The madness began literally two minutes before I was intending to leave, just finished a private English lesson. At some point I had been planning to use the only half hour free I had during the day to go the market and get fruit, but that was clearly not going to happen.

In fact, me going anywhere was kind of a sketchy proposition.

Usually the madness calms down after a bit, but this time it only got stronger, as if this time it was feeding off its own fury. The raindrops were literally striking the buildings, the air turning gray from its force. Though I had been sitting on the balcony, the rain invaded that too, riding in on the wind.

We fled inside. I was intending to just wait it out and be a few minutes late. In the meantime there was food, some kind of chicken curry cooked in banana leaves and red rice, a fruit salad with mango, banana, lychee, and various other goodness. So we munched, and stared at the rain. I attempted to text a couple of my students to tell them I was going to be late -- unnecessary, as it turns out, they were all later than me.

At some point I decided that the rain was not going to stop anytime soon, and pulled on a borrowed flimsy yellow plastic poncho and headed out to brave the rain.

The sky was literally falling.

The streets were flooding, everywhere, intersections turning quickly to lakes. My bike made a perfect wake in front of me, spattering my shoes with warm water. The drops were accosting my face, only held off when I used one hand to pull the hood further in front of my eyes -- but doing so involved steering with one hand, so I used this power with great discretion.

I ran home, shuffled about trying to figure out how to get my backpack off without taking off the poncho, and grabbing a full change of clothes, before tearing out again and heading directly back into the madness.

By the time I got to Cambodian Living Arts, the streets were seriously flooded, and I hit a lake of at least six inches deep at the intersection. I didn't think it was possible for flip flops to be as wet as mine were when at last I arrived, dripping wet and what wasn't from rainfall was from sweat from the plastic poncho.

Of course, the vast majority of my students were late, choosing to make the trip after the madness at last died down. But I figured, I'm the teacher, so I'm kind of obligated to at least try to make it on time.

With all of that said -- between the water hitting my feet in huge sprays, accosting my eyes, the sound of it attacking the rooftops ---

Well of course it was fabulous.

Catching up with the workshops (holy cow these kids are talented)

It's been awhile since I've written about my workshops, and yet they have continued, Monday to Friday of every week, from 2-5pm. There's a lot to say, and it will take me more than one blog post to say it (and no doubt I'll forget half of it, or come back to it some weeks from now), but I thought I would try to put something down into words.

I'm not sure where I left it, maybe somewhere during the first workshop when the kids were finally starting to understand what was going on. Understand it they did, and went crazy the final week with creating their solos. The day of the showing they brought in costumes and make up and various other extravagances, and quite thoroughly made an impression on the Cambodian Living Arts staff that was not expecting to see anything quite so well put together.

The second workshop, on group choreography, was a very different group; while the mean age for the first was somewhere around sixteen, this was more like twenty. The first day I had about eleven kids, but three of them must have decided it was too much, as I finished with a good group of eight.

The thing about that one was that I had designed it awhile ago and had included a lot of improvisation. Knowing at that point how little improv these kids had done, if at all, I was pretty worried for how well it was going to go over, but surprising me greatly - and pleasantly - it was no issue at all.

In fact, the workshop was a really great success, shorter but more intense and ultimately more productive than the first, and they finished with two group pieces of four dancers each. Well-thought out, crafted, interesting pieces each, and again wowed the CLA staff, enough that the program director suggested we start looking for a way to do a public performance to bring these pieces to a wider audience.

(Maybe I've already mentioned this before, but I can't say just how excited I am about this idea, and how it has sparked the resurrection of Gillian-with-a-project and kicked the six week slump to the curb. Whereas my personal pet projects are going nowhere, this idea has energy and movement, and I'm ready to jump in with both feet. Something about regular performances and spaces to create work...)

These were the kids that wanted to eat together after the showing, the ones who are now not just my students, but my friends, and four of them returned for the third workshop. Two have been with me since the beginning. Two of them had sat in to watch previous workshops. Out of the eleven total, two are women, and the mean age is probably around twenty again.

This last workshop has been really interesting, some good, some bad. Besides the daily standoffs, this one is about how to choreograph, and I'm finding it somewhat tricky. I have redesigned most of it on the fly because I don't like the exercises I'd planned. How do you teach someone how to create?

Mostly I've just been trying to show them a bunch of stuff, lead them through exercises to get them to explore all the various possibilities for movement and for structuring the work. I've had to explain it a few times, and have gone off on a couple rants about taking responsibility and taking charge and not looking to anyone else for validation.

I think some of it is working, at least, I hope. I can never tell. On Friday I had them use what they'd learned to make a little mini-solo -- each one a wonderful expression of its dancer's style and personality -- and then put it on someone else. It was a fascinating experience, and while it was too short of a time to really properly teach the solo, I noticed one of my guys was nervous when his dancer was performing his solo.

He had taken ownership of that little solo to the point that he was nervous about seeing it performed, and it made me so happy. Yes, I wanted to say, it's ridiculously nerve-wracking to see your own work on the stage. Because it's yours, because you love it, and because you can't do anything else but watch.

We'll see how next week goes -- each student gets forty five minutes to set their own dance. I'm worried that they'll try to do too much and make long dances, when forty five minutes is nothing at all and if it were me, a minute long would be pushing it. But hopefully it will work out, and I'm very excited to see what they come up with.

The fact of the matter is that these kids have become incredibly important to me. I think they're incredibly talented, curious, and courageous. I want to do everything I possibly can to help them to be professional artists, to get them in front of audiences, to offer them a space to create and refine their skills. Let it no longer be said that Khmer people can't/won't/don't know how to create.

In fact, my only problem is getting them to stop creating long enough to be good dancers for each other, and not frustrate the heck out of whoever is trying to tell them what to do.

Friday, from moment to moment

The early morning is not so hot. In fact, in the shade it is perfectly pleasant, the wind blowing by my face on the bike ride to work. The Independence Monument, which has been closed for renovation and covered in green scaffolding, is suddenly open now. In the pale morning light, its very beautiful with the brown material -- whatever it is, stone? - and its dozens of naga guardians.

By the time I get to work, of course, after a stop at the post office to discover a package notice in my box for someone named "Laura Linner Aim," whoever that is and not the package I'm still waiting for, I am not nearly so fresh. Nine o'clock must be the time when the day loses the its last hint of dawn and heads into the normal state of too darn hot.


The woman in the kitchen's hands are shaking. She deals with them in a way that says they have been shaking for a long time. I wonder if they frustrate her, or if she only notices them now because I'm noticing them, or if she does notice that I am. She offers me fish sauce for the fish soup, very traditionally Khmer. Some kind of simple base, with greens, something that could be either bamboo or green beans, some fish (with bones, of course), and various other veggies. It has a sharp, distinct taste. Her spoon rattles against the bowl as she pulls out the last of the fish.

There is a small cut of fish as well, and a plate of rice, and as I quietly eat, she begins peeling some vegetables, stops to comb her daughter's hair. All the while, her hands shake. A mosquito bites me, painfully, on the calf.


There are two men in the DHL office while I wait for them to track down the package for me. One of them is the rough, street-worn kind of man, dressed in a baseball cap, an untucked button-down shirt, and corduroy pants, a little baggy. He lets the sandals fall off his feet as he stands by the corner, and pulls out a role of wadded bills from his pocket to pay. The hems of his trousers are a bit dirty, a little too long for him.

The man next to him is impeccably dressed, in a pink button down shirt tucked into khakis and brown dress shoes. He has an iPhone in a case, and the hems are perfectly clean, because the pants are tailored to his height.

From where I am sitting, here in this sterile office with security and professionalism branded everywhere you look, the contrast is startling, and remarkable.


The daily standoff begins during warm ups, when we do some extended shoulder warm ups. He's an older guy, nine years older than me though he could be older. He already missed one class, left early without notice another, and is missing a full three days and the showing next week. I agreed to let him stay and have wished ever since I didn't.

The standoffs are nothing particularly big. He says nothing, but his eyes scream it, at least that's what I hear from them (whether or not they actually are saying it is another question): How is this helping me? Go ahead. Teach me something. He falls asleep when I tell them about the day's exercises, drops his arms loudly during the shoulder warm ups.

I understand what I'm teaching is strange. I don't understand disrespect. Maybe it's just me, and my own hooks, my own insecurity. But every day I fight against the bored defiance I think I catch in his eyes. I don't understand, they say. I don't see how this works. I don't get it. 

I don't make a special effort to engage him. I teach what I can, offer what I can, and I'm not going to change the workshops now. I can't teach them what to create, or even how, I can just open doors and show them ideas, give opportunities and offer sparks. But I will not sit down and tell them that this is how you must choreograph. It's definitely why I decided not to sit down and teach a four year old how to speak English.


An hour teaching the Thriller dance to enthusiastic but rhythmically challenged employees of an NGO in town who decided it would be fun to do Phnom Penh's first flash mob, and a private lesson later, I find myself on the Riverside with a friend, at a little narrow restaurant. They make a mean cheeseburger, and as we sit, vendors come up to try and sell us things. All ages, and all wares -- books, trinkets, movies, whatever. They don't harass you too much, and the lights by the river are beautiful at night.

Much later, the two of us are on the back of a moto going home, the deserted streets and the now-cool wind blowing back my hair. I look up to watch the sky going by, a luxury I certainly can't afford on my bike.

There were certainly more moments than that, but I picked out the ones that struck me at the time, like the normal goings on of life suddenly stopped for a second to say, look at that. Notice that. And so I did.

The banalities, the six week slump, and trying to remember where I was yesterday

So I was just thinking, I should save writing about the banalities for Tuesday Night Chatter, but then I realized several things. (All at the same time, so naturally I will have forgotten most by the time I write this.) The first was that, I will never remember everything I'm thinking of now on Tuesday, and TNC is mostly just for stream-of-consciousness anyway, a kind of snapshot of a moment. And besides, currently, the little observations, little ideas, short stories and small pictures, are what is making up my life these days.

I have some posts in the works with a bit more point, mostly about the workshops that I've grossly neglected to mention for several weeks. But in the meantime, I want to tell you about the small things.

Like how I got stuck biking in a real monsoon the other day, the several minutes of madness (only this time it lasted about an hour), and it was only the bright pink, flimsy poncho that one of my students gave me out of the goodness of his heart that saved me. Mostly, I just couldn't see, blinking madly as the raindrops assaulted my eyes and hunching my shoulders; not because they were getting wet, but because I guess I thought I could use them to shield my eyes.

The six week slump, I think I addressed somewhat last TNC, fueled by a lack of power and internet, the onset of a nasty head cold, and various other factors, has been rearing its ugly head this past week. I've been referring to it, but I don't think I've articulated its main source in clear terms on this blog yet, though I have to my family. The fact of the matter is this: I came to Cambodia with some fuss and fanfare, with a grand vision - subconscious or otherwise - to modernize and develop the dance form and be some kind of hero, or heroic presence. I didn't think of it in such terms, but I did.

I found out pretty quickly that that was not in fact what I wanted to be doing, that it was the most grossly western and arrogant thing I could do. Therefore, it left me scrambling a bit, and dealing with a very simple fact: I don't know why I'm here.

I don't mean this in a bad way. I don't even think it's a bad thing, and I don't think it's permanent. I don't particularly wish to be elsewhere, and don't regret having come here. But the fact remains. I came here because someone asked me to, and now I have to create what it means.

I'm sure that the previous times that I went to live in a new place -- Asheville, New York, Paris -- I went through this stage too, this maddening stage where you are where you are and glad to be there, but trying to adjust as quickly as you can and understanding that you can't hurry it along, but live it through. It's encouraging that I don't remember those times, because that means they were unimportant in the long run, and the breakthrough more than paid the hours spent running at the wall.

(You know, even when I want to not have a point I somehow ended up creating one. In blog posts as well as life, apparently.)

Anyway, it's also not like I'm not busy. There is a lot going on, and yet somehow I find that when you ask me what I've been doing I have no idea what to say, such that, like now, when I sit down to write blog posts I stare at the screen blankly, wracking my brains for something to write about.

I dropped the teaching job with the trust that I would be able to live without it, and that if it wasn't the right fit there was no point in doing it, and since then I picked up an odd job teaching an NGO the Thriller dance (despite not really knowing it myself) a couple hours a week and was contacted about another dance teaching thing. I modeled for an art gallery's weekly 'Drink & Draw' and picked up five bucks. Somehow, things are fitting together in ways that I couldn't have possibly expected, but that are only possible because I trusted enough to say no to something I couldn't fully commit to.

Besides getting caught in the rain -- and it has been VERY rainy recently, precisely after I said something about it not raining much -- the main adventures of the past week have been mostly in guessing how long until the power comes back, finding ways to keep cool and cheap cafés to go to, and obsessively reading the Fountainhead, which I finished on Wednesday (and loved).

Also, I apologize if I repeat myself. It's a bad habit, but when you can't remember what you've been doing without serious mental strain and just go for the main themes, you often mutter the same themes over and over again...

Tuesday Night Chatter

Thanks to the brave who commented last time, again I welcome comments and questions, should you so decide to pass them on. They will be addressed in next week's edition of TNC.

Russ, I am not sure how the post office works, if it does, indeed, work. The post office is enormous and there are about a million windows, each one for something else, and the western forums are filled with horror stories of officers taking money for stamps and canning the letter, or overcharging, or generally being nefarious. However, I have also heard that friends have successfully sent and received packages and letters, and therefore I'm sure that the truth, as it always is, is somewhere in between.

The building is huge, and yellow, and has a wide parking lot in front, probably the only parking lot I've seen here (I forgot to mention in my post about traffic that the sidewalks are always mistaken for parking, and thus there is always someone backing into the middle of oncoming traffic). My box is in the very back, at the end of a hallway, in a wooden cabinet with the others. I have been told that sending stuff to the post office is more or less reliable but at least you are not trusting the letter to some tuk tuk driver who has no blessed clue where your address actually is.

As for subtle cultural differences, Tristen, I could probably write a novel but naturally most are escaping me right now. They come in quiet realizations and understandings, like the fact that you aren't supposed to touch people on the top of the head because that's where the soul apparently is. I also get the impression that people act very differently towards westerners and therefore some of those real differences are lost in the exchange. I will, however, try to note it as I go.

In the meantime, if having a cold means there is too much going on, then...there is too much going on. I am not too sick to do anything but enough to snuffle around my house and sneeze violently whenever I turn the fan on. I think it's also because my over-active hamster brain has been on double duty the past couple weeks and keeps me up long after I turn out the lights.

It's been a terrible weekend for the utilities; I was without internet from Friday night through Sunday afternoon, and without power from early this morning until around five thirty. Nothing fatal, but thoroughly inconvenient and required me spending more money than planned at the cafés for internet and today for lunch.

One good thing about the time, during which I groped about desperately for something to do with myself, was picking up The Fountainhead, which I had with me from the states and never felt like I had the energy to deal with. With nothing better to do, I've very much enjoyed reading and confess myself totally engrossed -- it's interesting, however much you know how you are being beaten over the head with the philosophy, it's still so fascinating. I personally think Ms. Rand spent a lot of time reading Nietszche...

I've been worrying about money this week. I did, in the end, quit the tutoring job with the four-year-old -- and don't regret it, but it does make paying September's rent a bit of an adventure, though I think it will be fine in the end.

I'm not afraid to admit it hasn't been a great week; I've been stressed, worried, and frustrated with the lack of internet, which serves to make me miss home all the more for having lost my permanent link with it. I'm not dancing, which always makes me grumpy, and the fusion project has inexplicably stalled, leaving me scrambling to figure out how to proceed and what really I'm doing/want to accomplish with my time here.

My saving grace has been my workshops. The first was good, the second better, and the third so far proving to be the best. I have four repeat students and two I already know; they are all great and interested and generally fantastic. Although I have no idea what they are saying to each other, I think they're hilarious. The kicker was today in class, when one of my students (one of two who have been there since the first workshop) startled me by asking during a break, "Yan, do you want to be a supermodel?"

"Absolutely not," I answered, but he said, "But why not? You're tall." And sort of as a hesitant afterthought, "And beautiful." Of course I preened.

They then proceeded to all flabbergast me in a very simple exercise about initiation (where in the body the movement comes from) with the incredible innovation, depth, and thought they managed to pack into a simple thirty second phrase. I swear, I have nothing to do with this stuff. I just open the door, and they come storming through.

So here I am. Very far away, and totally uncertain, but I am here. And as one of my favorite Zen sayings remarks, wherever you go, there you are.

Photo/video blog: to the market

Taking full advantage of my last day endowed with a camera (thank YOU, Marta!!), I decided to take you along as I went to the market to buy my usual fruits and veggies. I took some videos as well, which will hopefully work. 

The first thing I wanted to say was this: having a camera gives such a different energy. When it is just me, striding along as though I know where I'm going (and by now, I do), I think people accept that I must live here. But with a camera slung around my neck -- and maybe it was because I was looking, or not from anyone else at all but my own impression of myself -- the energy changed. Suddenly I was A Tourist, and eyed as such. 

I didn't like it, and it is one of the big reasons why I am against cameras in general and why I don't currently own one (though it's still on my wishlist, a growing affair for whenever I have disposable income again, which could be awhile). So I took the camera from my neck and wrapped the strap around my wrist instead. It was still obvious, but less aggressive, I thought, and I could take more surreptitious pictures. It also means they are much more wonky, and the videos shaky, but hey. It's real time. 

Heading out the gate, I saw this fantastic tuk tuk and had to take a picture. 

This video was taken on my walk, to give you an idea of the sights, sounds, and etc.

Here I am heading into the market.

I got the veggies first, as usual. 

Photo from the wrist

Heading back towards my favorite fruitseller.

Photo along the way...

Some ramboutan at the fruit stand...

And some dragonfruit (and a friend).

Bananas hanging from the ceiling! 

The fruit haul. (For five dollars and seventy five cents.)

And the veggie haul. For seventy five cents.

Considering the amount of time it has taken me to format, upload, and generally make pretty this post, you can safely assume I will be happy to return to words, but I'm happy to be able to share this with you at least. Tomorrow another Tuesday Night Chatter is on the way -- it's not too late to send questions! Unless you really do just want to hear what I have to say, in which case...that works just as well! 

A feast among friends

Thursday was the last day of my second workshop, this one focused on collaborative choreography (and will be the subject of a post whenever I get my act together). Greatly different from the first one, this demanded a lot of improvisation and group work.

The first week was a hodge-podge of various crazy exercises I have picked up across the years, all of them perfectly alien to my students, which were a great group of eight dancers. There were many more the first day, but the younger ones, perhaps not ready to deal with the concepts, bowed out after that and I was left with a strong, tight-knit group.

I had absolutely no sense if what I was doing was making an impact whatsoever. And yet, on Wednesday I was informed -- asked, but it felt more like being informed -- that I was going to stay after the showing on Thursday to eat with the kids.

(I say "kids," but I really shouldn't, because most of them are around my age. The youngest is sixteen; the oldest twenty-three, but the average is around twenty. I only know this by peeking at their birth dates on the registration sheets...)

Somewhat bemused, I agreed. They were really excited about it, even going so far as trying to get one of their friends to come who spoke more English. They pooled all their money, and then the next day turned up after the showing with bags full of food.

This was just snack food; they'd ordered a full meal. Dumplings, fried mushrooms, veggies, corn, toasted bred with coconut milk sauce for dipping, hot sauce, and what I assumed to be fried chicken (more on that later). To drink, they'd brought up a bunch of ice and red soda, fruit punch that was somewhat mystifyingly green, coke, and fanta.

"Yan," one of them announced, "we can eat now." When he saw I was about to put on some music, he shook his head. "No music, we talk."

So I came over to join the circle. It was all the kids from this workshop, plus one or two from the past one and a friend or two of theirs. Everyone attacked the food, chattering happily away in Khmer and making jokes. We didn't communicate with words, not really -- most of them still call me 'Teacher', but nevertheless it didn't seem to matter at all. We ate, we laughed, and although we barely understood one another, we were friends, and I knew that despite the fact they were enjoying their own inside jokes, I was included and welcomed.

About the 'chicken': I asked if it was indeed. "No," I was informed, "Frog."

Oh dear, I thought, and said, managing not to drop it like a hot coal. Now that I looked at it, it was fairly obvious, though thankfully it was missing the head and the front legs. I considered for a second, then figured it couldn't be worse than the unborn duck chick, took off one of the legs, dipped it in the sauce, and cautiously took a bite.

It wasn't that bad, actually; it was sort of like fish except not, and certainly not like chicken. But either way, I finished eating it, and by the time I glanced down, all the rest had disappeared -- frog is apparently somewhat of a delicacy, and the kids had followed my example by helping themselves.

When you sit me down and tell me to teach, I have no idea what to do, but somehow it just offering these kids what I know and love, acting as guide and mentor, I have managed to do something special. There is something wonderful about sharing food and sharing a meal, and I think honestly it doesn't matter at all that we don't really understand each other's words, because it all other respects, we understand each other perfectly.

Traffic "laws"

The first thing you need to know is the city lay out. It is more or less in grids, though there are certain streets you can't get through to from other streets where the water cuts through (I think), and thus some streets don't go through. Generally speaking, odd numbered streets run north-south, with the numbers going up as you travel east. Even run east/west, and get smaller as you go north.

Of course, there isn't much rhyme or reason, or so it seems. 294 is followed by 302, though 296 and 300 exist, just further to the west, across Monivong (one of the main arteries). Only the main arteries have stoplights, the rest is a free for all in the intersection. 

(Don't get me started on the housing numbers, which make even less sense than the street numbers. They proceed more or less in chronological order, but one odd number on one side of the street is absolutely no guarantee it will continue, and simply because the numbers are going down doesn't mean they will continue to do so. If, as is often the case, two houses have the same numbers, a letter is thrown on the end for kicks -- the most common being A and EO, though why is really quite beyond me.)

In the meantime, there are certain rules that everyone follows, though they cannot really be called traffic laws in the way we westerners would think of them. Once you figure them out, however, you can get along just fine, if by fine you don't mind a few heartattacks on each trip.

The most disconcerting thing for me is the way to turn left at intersections. You turn to the far left side of the road you want and drive on the wrong side of the road until the opportunity to cut across oncoming traffic presents itself and you can get back to the right side.

At stoplights, the motos and bikes wind their way up to the front, disregarding the lane markers entirely and often spilling into the oncoming traffic lanes. Red lights for many motos means 'take more caution when crossing the road', and they wait until everything is most calmed and then motor on across. If you don't start pedaling when the countdown -- large red numbers on the stoplights announcing just how long you have to wait -- hits "4", you'll be left in the dust, but then it's important to be aware as someone will always be pushing the limit of when the red light actually appears.

For those intersections without stoplights -- that is to say, most of them -- it's just a touch and go process to wind around everyone and hope the car in front of you isn't blocking a moto traversing on the other side (which it inevitably is.) This is similar to turning left without a light, in which case you just wind your way through oncoming traffic wherever there are gaps.

My trick is usually to find a moto or a car turning at the same place as me and then hiding behind them, using them as a shield and zipping through the hole they create. It works, most of the time.

Cambodian drivers are remarkably patient with this crazy system, and despite the hundreds of near collisions in one short drive, road rage is very rare. Honking, however, is common place. Generally speaking, though, the honk is used for both moto and car to simply announce its presence, usually as it is cutting across several lanes of oncoming traffic to turn left or something of the sort. Since people get cut off all the time, honking usually serves as a warning that, although you may have just swerved in front of me, I am still here.

Honking can also be used to clear the way, as the more important cars use it just to make the smaller ones get out of the way. There is definitely a hierarchy, starting at the top with the big cars, then the small cars, then the tuk tuks, motos, and lastly bikes -- yet another reason to use the cars as a shield.

The last thing you need to avoid are the huge carts carrying supplies - they move slowly because it's just one moto pulling it (no chevy trucks here, no sirree), laden with supplies and with at least one or two young men sitting on top, with dusty clothes and scarves over their mouth - and the food carts. These are sometimes like huge, glorified wheelbarrows or like the push carts you might find in Central Park. Their owners either walk them around or attach them somehow to a moto, and drive along the side of the street, announcing their presence with a little horn playing a ditty that may be the most annoying thing I have ever heard. But it works like an ice cream cart.

And I may have mentioned it before, but the motos, aside from being absolutely ubiquitous, carry the damndest things. It is not uncommon at all for whole families, including very small children, to be perched on top, or for huge boxes of god-knows-what tied precariously to the back. If you can put it on the thing and it doesn't collapse, well, then there you go.

It's not unorganized, as I thought at the beginning, and perhaps seems much more dangerous than it really is. But if you are paying attention, and understand where you are supposed to turn, it works out just fine.

However, and especially since the bag snatching incident, I wear a helmet. 

Photo blog: To a café!

What you have been waiting for forever, I know. I filched my friend's camera to film the workshop showing on Thursday and thought I'd just take advantage of having it around to take some pictures and fill some gaps for you...I've been told I actually do describe well, but there's just something about seeing it. 

Well, without further ado, here is me, on my first weekday afternoon off in five weeks, heading to a café to work on designing my next workshop. 

It starts in my apartment. Here's the view from my window. That's Independence Monument, the Eiffel Tower of Phnom Penh. 

This is my living room, just before I packed up my computer to head out .

You leave my apartment, and head down these incredibly steep stairs.

Then, you head out the gate. The padlock is usually locked. I keep my bike here, behind the gate. Locked to the bannister.

The intersection I live on. This is looking South down Norodom.

Looking the other way. There's a food cart on the right, and the still-in-renovation Independence Monument just down the way. How many traffic violations can you spot?

A cool building I noticed on the walk.

Brown Cafe, my favorite. Not just because it's so cute!

Some of the seating areas inside.

Awesome huge windows and awesome trees.

The table where I decided to sit and surreptitiously take pictures of the cafe.

The painting across from me. I am a sucker for this kind of painting...so pretty.

I ordered an iced condensed milk coffee, a Cambodian specialty. And a couple cookies, just for kicks. :)

There will be more pictures coming this weekend. Get excited....

Biking in the monsoons

"Life in the wide world goes on, much as it has this past age, filled with all its comings and goings."

A very famous wizard said this in a movie once, and he might have said it in a book too, but those exact words are currently escaping me.

The fact of the matter is, I just don't know what to tell you. Life goes on, and I feel like I'm repeating myself a great deal these days. What do I do? I ride around on my bike, these days with helmet firmly buckled on head and backpack sweating on my back.

In fact, I do that so much that I think I know what I can tell you.

Until yesterday, I had been extraordinarily lucky in my timing on the bike. I was often on it after the rain, or right before, or arrived in my house a scarce thirty seconds before the deluge. I'm still, actually, pretty lucky, as I wasn't caught in the worst of it.

Perhaps I have never actually put words to the rain, which were pretty commonplace the first few weeks and have been conspicuously missing since then. I found this odd, and thought it maybe the reason it's been so hot. The rains do cool it down.

They come quickly and suddenly. Once you start to hear the drops starting to hit the tin roofs, you have a bare second or two to find cover before it hits the streets, big fat drops that look like curtains falling from the sky. It pounds, blows, and consumes the world in madness for ten, fifteen minutes, before dying away and softly sputtering, sometimes for hours after.

The streets flood, small lakes appearing on the sides of the street and worming their way into traffic, the motos and cars doing what they can to avoid driving through and covering everyone else in muddy splashes. Some people, the brave, go without raincoats, but most people wear the disposable plastic poncho thing, clinging to sweating skin. The rest run for cover. There's not much point in having an umbrella, really; the rains are too heavy, and too strong.

It was only raining slightly at the time, having completed the main section of its fury, but it was still an adventure, swerving around the puddles and still splashing my legs, trying to hold up my aladdin pants to avoid getting wet from the dripping bike. Carefully riding the brakes, and wiping drops away from my helmet, and trying to avoid the stares from the other drivers.

Crazy barang, I always imagined them thinking. 'Barang' is a general term for white people, though it also specifically means 'French'. It's derived from "français," which the Cambodians can't say, and became 'barang' over the years.

I'm sure one of these days I'll get caught in the full on monsoon, but for the moment -- I'll just knock on wood, and suspiciously eye the clouds out the window whenever it's close to the time for me to be on a bike.  Because, clearly, that is a foolproof plan.

Tuesday Night Chatter

Welcome back to Tuesday Night Chatter! I've been thinking about this a lot since I decided to do it last week and thought I'd try something....readership on Pixie Dust Chronicle is up (are you a member yet? Oh you aren't? What are you waiting for?), and I thought it could be fun -- or not -- to use this series to interact with you, my dear readers.

So here's the deal: is there anything you want to know about living here that I'm not addressing? Questions about anything, about me or the blog, my mission or the moon, this adventure or past ones or future ones? Ask it in the comments and I'll try to answer it in the next week's issue of Tuesday Night Chatter. If there are no questions, I will assume that I have done such a good job that I have actually covered everything, and will just continue on my merry way as before, but it could be fun! Ask away, my friends!!

So what's on my mind tonight?

I'm thinking a lot about private tutoring, and specifically my four-year-old. His mom is the sweetest and most patient woman imaginable, hiring a young twenty something with no formal teaching training to spend time with her kid, but -- what I sort of thought would be a 'spend time with the kid and talk to him' has turned into a 'sit down and teach him for one hour.'

Now, I don't mind learning, and I don't mind the pay. But I'm wondering if it's worth it. Do I spend the time and the energy to become a good preschool teacher, when teaching is neither my expected career nor -- more importantly -- my passion, just because the pay is good and the job regular?

I think you know where I'm leaning, even though to ditch the job may be considered stupid. Hey, I've done stupider things in my life.

I'm also thinking it's too darn hot (you can all say, "well, what were you expecting???" now). Of course I knew, and don't expect it to change any time soon, but nevertheless after a certain point it gets tiring to be constantly sweaty and unattractive.

What else...I really need to do dishes, as I've developed the terrible habit of putting them off until the next day and since 'the next day's have been blurring into each other at a speed that can only be described as remarkable, they tend to pile up. I also need to figure out what I'm doing tomorrow morning; another function of the time passing this fast is that I'm never exactly sure what day it is.

It's so interesting, living here. One of my other private tutoring clients, and probably my favorite because of her motivation, is Chinese, and sometimes we just halt the lesson to talk about the different cultures. Like tonight, how Chinese people apparently don't touch each other and how she finds it very strange that the French kiss each other all the time.

I brought that up -- I think -- because it's just one example among thousands of how I'm becoming so aware of my westernness, and what the east really is -- or at least what I perceive it to be. I do feel like a 'foreigner', constantly and sometimes uncomfortably aware of my own otherness. I wonder if that will ever go away, or if in six months I'll still feel like I stick out like a sore thumb as much -- and I don't really mean in looks.

I guess the past couple weeks have been a struggle, though I don't like using that word because it adds a color I don't mean to paint with. This week especially I've been on the "now what" side of things -- if I'm being very honest, I did come with a vision of westernizing the dance here, and have found out from all sides that that's not in fact what I should be doing at all. So now I have to figure out what's next, what's left, what to sell and what to keep, and what, really, the hell I am doing here.

Like I said. I've done stupider things.

Tonight's chatter has been a bit more philosophical than I really intended, but it does reflect what I'm thinking besides the inanities of dishes, a few hundred mosquito bites, and being constantly disgustingly sweaty. I have, after a full ten days, learned how to use my new phone (also the most basic model you could get), my visa has been extended, and I am still dubiously waiting for the Post Office to deliver a few very important items. My brief and somewhat alarming spell of being allergic to my apartment seems to have passed, and I seem to be manifesting my homesickness by being constantly hungry.

As I said, leave questions in the comments. Expect the usual serious and pointed blog posts (I don't think I'm kidding myself...), that is until next week this time and I can blast you with the more plebeian aspects of existence.

PS. The fruitseller update is that this week I got a free bagful of berries to go with the usual haul of apples, bananas, mangosteen, a grapefruit, and something I suspect to be a pomegranate (the seeds of which she dumped into my hand to try before I decided to take one, then threw in a second to make the weight an even kilo.) I think I like this woman...

PPS. Last time at the Supermarket I bought some normal instant coffee, having at last finished the 3-in-1 crap I had before -- only to discover that either I have the proportions totally skewed or this stuff is even more crap than the previous incarnation. Whoops.

Gillian vs. The Tourists: Sovanna Phum Arts Association

I just returned from seeing a performance at the Sovanna Phum Arts Association (www.shadow-puppets.org) -- as you can guess from the URL, they mainly do shadow puppets, employing various arts students and graduates. I think it's either entirely or almost entirely a male troupe, though that might have just been this performance.

Their theater is in the south of Phnom Penh, somewhere you would not expect to find a theater. It's on the side of the road essentially, a slanted tin roof to cover it and maybe five lights. The stage itself is wood, with a white screen for the puppets. Backstage is hidden by black sheets, and the audience sits on wooden benches, each progressively taller than the one in front of it.

The audience was mainly expat -- I suppose it's advertised by tourist agencies as an authentic experience with the Cambodian culture, as there are very few performances to choose from. There was a live orchestra, and we were welcomed by the director, a man with a kind face and broken English, but a wide smile.

The performance was a mix of shadow puppets and classical dance, telling a story from the Ramayana involving a lot of fighting and a demon masquerading as a Prince's wife. All sorts of good stuff, in other words. They gave us a program explaining the story, though I finally noticed that if you pay attention, you can follow the story, even with the puppets.

The puppets themselves are made of some unidentifiable pliable substance, maybe paper, and intricately cut to represent different scenes. The dancers use them both behind and in front of the screen, their own movements often mirroring the sentiment of their puppets'. The pictures do tell the story, though occasionally -- something I found somewhat strange at first -- the orchestra stops and one of the band members speak/chants the words of one of the characters -- more like theatre.

I have seen enough of the classical dance to start to recognize the characters, and am building a sort of base of knowledge to understand what's going on. In fact, even though most people say it's just slow and boring, I'm finding this to be patently untrue. There is emotion, there are dynamics -- you just have to know how to watch.

As the performance began, the lights went out. There were five shadow puppets, without people, resting in front of the screen, and one by one the performers came out to kneel in front of them and bow. Paying respect to the stories they represent and the art form, I would guess. On the center three, incense sticks were stuck into the puppets and lit. A solemn ceremony, and after talking to Sophiline I understood its importance.

Not so, apparently, everyone around me.

As soon as the lights dimmed and the ceremony began, the tourists began snapping nonstop flash photos.

Now. In any kind of performance, you don't take flash photography. It is common courtesy and common decency, I don't care what kind of show it is. But then to do so during a very obviously sacred ceremony? Sacred dance depicting a sacred text? It's not just flat out disrespectful, but disgusting.

Not only that, but they didn't stop. Each time a new character appeared onstage, out came the cameras, and the flashes. Who cares if you actually see the performance, right? You gotta get the shot of that weird monkey creature. Besides, you don't know what's going on anyway, so may as well just photograph. Say you went to see real Cambodian dancing.

You might have guessed by now that I was livid. I was trying to block out the flashes and focus on the performance, but couldn't help seething. Who the hell do these people think they are, to storm into this country and this performance and take flash photography during a shadow puppet show, without any trace of shame? Oh look, we also went to see the local dance, isn't it amazing, here's a picture....

I'm sorry. That's not how it works.

Perhaps I'm overreacting, but the whole sorry business reeked of patronizing and arrogance. They wouldn't dare take flash photos in a theatre back home, but who cares here, right? It's just a dump of a theater, a roadside sideshow?

No, my friends, you hopelessly clueless and hopelessly arrogant people. No, this is art, art that has existed for thousands of years. It is a story that's been told a thousand times, and danced a thousand times, and when the performers put their hands together and bowed to the floor at the beginning, chanting and lighting incense, they were acknowledging a history and a sacred tradition that is intricately and inextricably tied to their culture.

But you missed that. You were too busy taking a picture.

Honoring where I have come: Khmer Arts, pt 3

Hungry or not, late or otherwise, as she got to talking about her mission and about helping me, Sophiline began to open up more and more, as though she had been waiting for this moment for a long time and just hadn't had anywhere to put the words that had clearly been rankling in her head.

The point of the whole rant -- if I may call it that -- was respect.

Ms. Sophiline Shapiro is a destination. People admire her, respect her, and recommend her to people. To reporters, researchers, and choreographers, who then come and talk to her. She knows, and is proud of it -- as well she should be. She is a gracious host, and takes time to talk to the people coming to see for themselves, people like me.

And yet. According to her, they come, they learn, they get inspired, and when they are successful, they no longer know her. If she is invited to the work they present, she's greeted with a cool thank you for coming. Even researchers -- they come to interview her, say they have been so inspired, and yet in the published work she's a source, and no more. One she said, didn't tell her they were doing a presentation in Phnom Penh and gave her no thanks in it, even though this particular researcher had apparently spent a long time interviewing Sophiline and her dancers.

Of course she is proud, and of course it's her own point of view, and of course the others might be surprised to hear her say it. But it doesn't make it any less of a problem. Excuse me, she said, if I'm a little skittish about these kinds of things, but I get hurt a lot.

It is not enough to just be inspired, but pay respect to the sources. From where she is coming from, it makes perfect sense. Even now, she said, I try to honor my teachers. Every day she burns incense in the theater to recognize them and pay her respects. Indeed, at the front of the stage is the pot of incense, hundreds of sticks now burned to the end.

I let her talk, listening deeply to her words, thinking what a magnificent woman. Proud and passionate, and wanting simply to be acknowledged for the force she is. As we all know so well, sometimes it's not enough to know yourself. Sometimes you just need to be told.

I've split this series into three parts because I wanted to make sure I got everything she said. I was -- like apparently so many others before me -- so inspired by her sheer presence, but more so by her passion. How the dance is part of her bones, how she believes in it so fiercely that she turns away any attempts to make it 'western' and 'commercial' and is making beautiful work. Her elegance, and finally her honesty.

I am here to learn. Though I had nothing to do with them, in this case I do carry the weight of those who came before me and, unwittingly or not, left without lighting their metaphorical incense to this fantastic woman. So I'll say it now and again and often, to her and to you and after I've left Cambodia and wherever this mad adventure takes me, and if I don't, slap me around a bit:

Ms. Sophiline Cheam Shapiro, you inspire me, and I would consider myself deeply blessed to have the same elegance and influence as you.

The master at work: Khmer Arts, pt 2

The dancers laughed with each other, making fun of the movements like any dancers do, pausing to hitch up their pants, a recurring problem. They stopped to stretch out cramps, and in the off time stretched their hands back to achieve the seemingly impossible curved hands of the form.

During one of the breaks, Sophiline came up to me, and invited me to the stage. We sat on the stage, concrete but covered with a soft carpet, and started to talk about her work, and what I'm looking to accomplish.

She was very supportive of the idea, and discussed some of her own experience "braiding" her work with the contemporary choreographers who come, that she does what she does best and they do what they do best, and they braid it together. She said she had six dancers who might be interested in working with me, and we spend a long time discussing how important it is that it be just two collaborators, on equal footing and with equal authority.

"Otherwise," she said, "it's just another form of colonialization, and Cambodia doesn't need that. We've suffered enough."

She called the dancers back and had them introduce themselves one by one. They went back to rehearsal and I sat on the side of the stage, watching as they tried to space a piece. At one point, they were trying to work on one section. Whatever Sophiline was seeing she didn't like, and sat the company down to watch as she herself did it.

While the others were clearly trying hard, stretching their hands and working to make the movement slow and beautiful, it was clear the movement was inside Sophiline's bones. There was no effort, no stretching or trying, just pure elegance.

I had already started to notice it earlier when the company was working; while before the classical dance seemed boring, and uneventful, here it was trance-like and elegant, and I could appreciate its beauty. I didn't know the stories they were telling with their hands, but watching Sophiline, I thought I got a sense of the emotion behind it.

At the end, she sat them all down and gave a full twenty minutes of notes, captivating just speaking -- and I didn't understand a word of the Khmer. I've known some -- but precious few -- people with that gift. Whatever it was she was saying, it was important, and I think it had to do with challenging themselves and pushing farther, as well as having self-confidence and presence onstage.

When the company left and she returned, I wanted to ask about her mission for the company, but asked if it was okay to talk. She said it wasn't really a good time, she was hungry -- but then something stopped her.

The short version, she said, is that I try to do everything. To build the classical form to be just as good, and then better, as it was in 1960, to make new choreography with the traditional form, and to investigate the contemporary form of the traditional.

But, she said, everyone thinks that to be contemporary, you have to be western, but I disagree.

It's funny: people say the Ministry of Culture isn't happy she's doing that contemporary work, and the westerners discount it because it doesn't look any different from the traditional dance.

It was another wake up call, a sort of 'duh' moment. Yes, me too, I had been thinking of 'contemporary' as synonymous with 'western', but yet she was talking about something different. An exploration, a deepening of her own form, her history and her training, and seeing where else it could go.

Thinking back now, about watching her work, fixing the angles of the hips and the shoulders by infinitesimal degrees, pulling the arm back an inch or adjusting the fingers ever-so-slightly, and then how the form just flows from her body, and it makes absolutely perfect sense. To make what she does -- this perfect and easy elegance -- into something that it's not, just to be western and therefore 'commercial' (another point she brought up), would be a massive and disgraceful disservice.

Especially after what she said about honoring where she comes from.

Under her watchful eyes: Khmer Arts (part 1)

NOTE: There is so much to say about my trip to Khmer Arts in the Takhmao province that I am splitting up the posts. Here is part one.

Of course I got lost trying to find it, pedaling around in a full circle and warily heading down a road that seemed to be never ending and not really taking me anywhere where I might want to go. I decided to trust my instinct that it was farther than I thought and kept going, alone and sweaty in the middle of nowhere and pedaling away on a one speed bike.

I finally found street 115, much farther than I was expecting and just as I was about to go over a bridge to god-knows-where, a dirt road that sped off into apparent no man's land, construction everywhere. But as I biked alone, I started to hear music -- traditional music. I veered of the hot, dry, and dusty path to the right, and found myself abruptly in the most wonderful oasis.

It was like someone had made a bubble around the place, cutting off the outside sounds. I parked my bike in a small lot with palm trees, the traditional music loud now. In front of me was the theater -- but nothing like any theater I'd seen. It was a huge pavilion, covered, wide open spaces (no chairs) and a patterned tile floors. Huge green sheets were hung from the high ceilings, to keep out the dust, I suppose.

On the side away from the road was the stage, and behind it, what looked like a temple. Four huge pagodas with faces carved on all four sides; some smiling deity with blank eyes and tall, stacked hats. Stairs wound up an around, from the stage and around the back. Palm trees had taken root -- or planted, more likely -- in every corner, and the stone was all intricately, beautifully carved. Naga, the snake guardians, and on the bannisters little monkeys crouched to hold it up.

I did some exploring -- I found the band, practicing in a small room under the stage, and all of the motos on the other side. The offices were clearly inside the "temple", and onstage some twenty five women were doing the slow, intricate, and elegant dance that is Cambodian classical dance.

Almost all were wearing tight bodices with dozens of little buttons running from navel to breastbone, and the traditional wrapped pants (which I think is just one piece of Cambodian silk, wrapped in a certain way, threaded through the legs, and fastened by a metal belt). A different music was playing through the speakers, drowning out the band below.

Wandering among them and fixing hands, pushing hips and shoulders back, was Ms Sophiline Shapiro, a woman I had heard of often and with great praise. She was a small woman, hair still very black and cut short for a Cambodian woman, in a long wrapped skirt. One of the greatest Cambodian classical dancers, she was forced to live in the countryside during the Khmer Rouge and was one of the first graduates of the Royal University of Fine Arts. She studied at UCLA in the United States, and then launched Khmer Arts in the hopes of reviving the classical arts.

I had heard she was working on a contemporary form of classical dance, that the Ministry of Culture wasn't sure about what she was doing, and generally had been told to get there and talk to her at all costs.

So there I was, watching her work, still elegant and most definitely the master. Sitting on the concrete steps and looking up in the faces of the gods and thinking, I never want to leave this place.

Tuesday Night Chatter

Generally speaking I have a point to my blog posts, or at least, I try. But I think I'm going to start a series, called "Tuesday Night Chatter," where I just lay out a smorgasbord of thoughts and short stories passing through my mind.

The first thing occupying my thoughts are the two strange red patches on the inside of my elbow, exactly where the skin touches itself when you bend your arm. Inside each patch, mirrored on both sides, are these little white dots that look for all the world like bite marks.

Naturally my thoughts have run the gamut from "It's nothing" to "It's some horrible disease" and I imagine the truth is probably somewhere between the two and closer to the former. It may indeed be the work of nefarious alien spiders, or just some enterprising bug that got smushed when I bent my arm in the middle of the night. My plan of action is to see if it goes away by itself, and probably shove it in the face of some unsuspecting friend who's been here for awhile and demand, "Is this a problem?"

The next thing is that I really need to remember to wear sunscreen -- my little wander around Phnom Penh reconstructing what was stolen left me with shoulders like lobsters and a weird handlebar tan line just across my knuckles. Oops.

The gecko outside my window -- he's there most every nights -- is croaking away. I think he just gets upset about things and clucks about them to himself, absentmindedly muttering "Geck-o, geck-o" to himself. Sometimes it's more emphatic, maybe an insult to the lizards taking up his wall space, and sometimes more forlorn, a soft 'geck-o' mournfully crooned to the night.

Things have improved since yesterday, where I was having a fit of west-sickness; a function, I think, of a particularly rough weekend including a night of food related yucks and then getting my bag snitched. The blessing was the highlight among all of that but was still a general downtrend. But thankfully everything has been replaced. I'm still cursing when I can't figure out how to use my new phone but the damage could have been much, much worse.

Improved mostly because I'm busier. I decided today to take a new tactic with my four year old tutoring job and it worked spectacularly, and the week is setting up to be busy and interesting and productive, always better for me. I have lots of work to do and am fairly motivated to do it.

I'm now thinking seriously about getting a Khmer teacher -- even though I did pick up a part time job, things are going to be tight this month and I'm worried, as always, about spending extra. But if I cut down on the treats (I confess to going a bit crazy at the supermarket on Sunday night, thinking chocolate was a good way to deal with the annoyance of the theft), it should all work out just fine and September looks to be my most lucrative month here.

In the introspection department, I'm thinking about two things, which will probably appear as longer entries on here sooner or later: 1, the trap of staying because it's "easier", and 2, the thought that however much I am currently teaching, I am not a teacher.

In the crazy Cambodian stories department, I went to the market today and discovered that I really should be going on the weekdays, as they have much more good produce. Though last time my friend the fruitseller convinced me to buy a mysterious fruit that turned out to be a papaya and absolutely disgusting, I let her talk me into buying something that I thought was a coconut but then she peeled like an orange, and later found out must be a grapefruit. One of the sweetest grapefruits I've ever tasted, actually...okay, we're even for the papaya now.

Sometime before I went on my current western food and chocolate kick, which may have changed things, I've noticed that my no-fat, bike-everywhere lifestyle has quite agreed with me, and have shed the post-graduation pounds that appeared on my hips when all I was doing was eating and partying. Funny how that works...

I probably shouldn't crow too much now, as tomorrow I'm heading off on quite a long bike ride to the Tahkmao province, but my legs aren't complaining quite so much about all the biking. I suppose this means that in place of legs I have long, flexible pieces of steel instead, but again, those words will probably have to be swallowed by this time tomorrow, and I will have returned to my usual state. It mostly involves a long monologue of whimpers and curses as I am dragging myself up the very steep stairs to my apartment.

Speaking of which, I should go to bed. If I did it right on my new phone (which is the cheapest model I could find, 18 bucks), there should be an alarm going off at 7:15 AM.

I hope.

Bag snatched

Honestly, it serves me right. I usually keep my bag in the front basket of my bike, and naturally, someone saw an opportunity, swerved close and snatched it. It was a stupid plan, and well, I paid for it.

However.

I was carrying neither passport nor passport copy. My debit card had barely any money on it and has already been cancelled. I lost all of my business cards with contacts, my phone, my keys, and my dayplanner.

The phone can easily be replaced, the keys slightly less easily but nevertheless possible, except my bike lock keys and locks are less than 5 bucks. My driver's license isn't helping me much anyway, and the only cash I had was 30 bucks.

Bag snatchers can be dangerous, and even fatal, if they knock you from the bike. All these guys did was take the bag -- I was untouched, and unharmed.

It happens. I'll be more careful, and it could have been a whole lot worse. I'll have to take some time to deal with it and the lack of keys is perturbing, but I managed to get into my house and hopefully it will be solved tonight.

Annoying, yes, inconvenient, yes. Moral of the story, don't carry your bag in the front basket of your bike, you idiot, and thank your lucky stars it wasn't worse.

All part of the adventure -- and it could have happened anywhere else, at any other time.

Still....assholes.

UPDATED: I have regained my access to the apartment and was able to go grocery shopping. Thank heavens, just this morning I had taken 100 dollars out of my wallet, and had some extra cash in a safe place so I wasn't stuck without money at all. Tomorrow will go to replace phone and post office key. Besides my day planner, which is easily replaced, things will be back to normal.

Blessings and Buddha

In the past week, I've found myself looking for some kind of cleanse and restart for many reasons. Getting settled in new life here, of course, but I think it's goes back to the end of the chapter of my life that was university and the transition into life, in a new and very foreign place. Figuring out what I want moving forward, and how to forgive and let go with what's past.

I am not a Buddhist, or a Christian, or anything religious. I am, in fact, an atheist to the core, though neither cynical nor militant. However, when my friend Nettra said her mom was urging her to go the temple and get blessed before her return to school in Paris, I immediately asked if I could come, feeling in it the opportunity I had been looking for.

We went this morning, very early, leaving the house at seven. The temple was just outside the city and we were going to meet a specific monk, who apparently knew the family and had blessed their house when they bought it. The temple was like the rest of them, the entrance a big, ornate gate and behind it the beautiful, curling architecture so markedly Asian. I had never been inside one before, only seen the pagodas of the temples here in the city.

There was a main sanctuary, if I can call it such, closed by a gate and clearly the heart of spirituality. It was built up, steeps steps going up with the bannisters covered in the sculptures of naga, a mythical seven headed snake, acting as guardian.

The entire compound is covered with those curled architectural flourishes and colors, gold and red and grey. Nearby there are small pagodas tombs, grey and ornately carved with their tall spires, though I never actually figured out for whom. Wealthy benefactors of the temple, maybe. In the back, tucked away behind the main building and another two story building, are the monks' quarters. They are nothing special, little blue bungalows with washing hung on the balconies. You could see them, walking around in half-togas of orange.

The monk in question was out getting food with several of his brothers, so we looked around a bit. Despite the construction on one side, the whole place was vibrating with peace and calm. There were stretches of grass, plants, and birds, a few lazy dogs. No one was hurrying, or rushing.

A few carloads of monks returned. These wear deep red robes, apparently a signal of what temple they're from. Our monk was very old -- I later learned he was ninety -- and was being helped by a younger monk. We did not go into the main sanctuary, but into a smaller, two-story building nearby. Inside was a room with a Buddha statue, covered with gifts, offerings, and candles, and then a small bench for the monk, covered again with offerings.

We had bought some bread to offer him, and presented it on a gold plate, seating ourselves on the carpeted floor. The monk's secretary began asking the sign of the year we were born, and the day we were born -- apparently there are certain days that are better to be blessed - if you do the whole nine yards - than others. Of the three of us, the two born in 1990 and the year of the Horse -- me and my friend Nettra -- were advised to be blessed. Our friend, a year of the Dragon, was told Sunday or Monday would be better.

I had been worried they wouldn't agree or it wouldn't be a good day for me. I was up half the night thanks to a dodgy dish of fried noodles with "Tofurkey" meat from a Chinese vegetarian dive and was feeling more in need of a blessing than ever. However, with my year accepted and Saturday apparently a good day for me, I followed Nettra into another room, with small tiled rooms.

In each were a couple short stools, barely five inches tall, and a tiled pool of water about a foot and a half by a foot. I had known there would be water involved but didn't realize how much, as Nettra handed over a sarong to wrap myself in and said to take everything else off.

Completely naked under the sarong, we sat on the stools to wait, our backs to the door. One of the guys working there brought some hot water to warm up the pool, and then the monk arrived. We bent our heads, hands together and touching the nose.

He began to chant in sanskrit, his older voice wavering slightly as he murmured the words, a sweet chant that faded at the end. He took huge bowlfuls over the water and poured them on us, our backs, necks, and heads. The water had been perfumed by flowers, and after two bowls Nettra said to wash my face. By the end -- five or six bowlfuls later -- we truly were drenched to the bone.

I don't know how to properly describe it. I didn't know what he was saying, but closed my eyes and felt the waves of encouragement pouring over my head with the water, and imagined it running down with dirt and confusion and everything else I wanted to let go of. I don't know why, but my eyes were full and my throat tight.

After, lacking towels, we dried off the best we could and got dressed, returning to the other room. I lit some incense -- eight sticks, following the advice of Nettra's mom, and placed them in the smaller offering to the Buddha just outside.

Because our friend hadn't gotten the full blessing, the monk blessed the four of us again, this time just sprinkling water and chanting. Following instructions, we bowed three times to the monk at the end, and then three times to the Buddha. "You can pray too, ask him whatever," Nettra's mom said.

To bow, by the way, you put your hands together by your head, then touch them to the ground, usually with the body bending as well. I did, and with my head on my hands, asked the Buddha for what I ask every god, regardless of whether or not I believe in them: strength, and courage.

As far as I can tell, one can never have too much of that.