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.
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