Go away, borohte: "Foreign Living Art"

After filming the informal showings during my summer workshops, and collecting the footage filmed by my translator on his iPhone, (and minus all the footage from my solo workshop thanks to an ill-placed spectator), I had a lot of film, and a friend of mine named Bernadette Vincent mashed it all up into a lovely reel style 7 minute video (link is here).

Cambodian Living Arts, who after all, facilitated the workshops, picked up the video and put it on their website and facebook, and prompted an entire cultural debate.

One person said, this isn't Cambodian, CLA used to do good work but now this? He asked, shouldn't it be called Foreign Living Art instead?

Others responded that this IS living art, it evolves and grows and creates. But it is destroying my culture, the guy repeated. Only Khmer can save Khmer culture.

He's not alone. For many people it is a legitimate fear. How do you deal with a generation more interested in contemporary than the classical? People here have seen their culture almost entirely vanish during the Khmer Rouge. There are no teachers, masters left. No wonder they are anxious. They have only begun to reconstruct, and now this western kind of culture is mixing in with the old and they worry, and perhaps rightly, about that what came before.

I'm sure you know where I stand. You can't keep culture in a box. I responded at one point, but I'm not trying to save Khmer culture. I'm just here to teach and encourage and experiment and learn. My background is in Western dance, and that's the only thing I know how to teach. The students enjoy it and I try to encourage them to be proud of their work, take control of their art, and be unafraid to create.

Is that destroying Khmer culture? Am I distracting them from focusing on what's important? Is it the west doing what the west does and would every one be better off if I took my westernness to the west where it belongs?

Of course I don't think so, and of course I don't know for sure. I think it's not about any one culture but the cross-culture, two fundamentally opposing cultures and dance learning from each other to explore what's possible.

Is that destroying Khmer culture?

Honestly, I think that'd be giving myself FAR too much credit.