One of the most fun things about our adventures is the constant exposure to the, to us, unusual and unknown. Other than Mexico, a culture we were already deeply familiar with, every place else we’ve been has offered thrilling novelty. Learning about a location’s arts and crafts, culture and history, is pure pleasure.

Cambodia has not disappointed. Let’s take a look at the performing arts.

Apsara Dance

When you think of traditional Cambodian dance, and I know you do, Apsara is what you’re picturing: slow, graceful movement with fingers curved backwards, hyperextended elbows, bent knees, arched spine, preternatural balance, and toes flexed upwards. Seriously, they could make sandwiches with those toes. Apsara has a distinctly Small House Of Uncle Thomas vibe.

There are a number of dinner theater establishments offering Apsara performances, but one stands out for both its rigor and its distance from the tourists of Pub Street, the aptly named Apsara Theater.

We were some of the only solo attendees, as two full buses threw up their contents into the theater. I’ll confess to being ambivalent about the big tours. It just feels a little weak to me, to come all this way and then insist on being cocooned for the entire experience, docented from place to place with everything curated for you.

But the alternative is what we’re doing, which I acknowledge is hard. Finding your way around without help, when you don’t know the language and don’t know how things work, is fundamental to the joy we find in our experience, but we’re not wired like other people, and what we’re doing is often exhausting, even to us.

Those busloads of people could have gone to EPCOT Center, but they put themselves out to go somewhere truly foreign to them, and they chose to do so in a way that didn’t induce panic and the sweats. They are, in their slightly different way, fellow intrepid travelers, and good for them for figuring out how to have this experience and enjoy it.

Honestly, I blow hot and cold on whether our approach is arrogant or brave. It’s felt pretty brave so far, as we’ve been able to pick up a modicum of local language wherever we’ve been, which allows us to avoid Ugly American Syndrome and navigate with some grace. Shit, Dorothy even learned to read Arabic when we were in the Maghreb.

But it feels more arrogant here, as neither of us has been able to learn more than a couple of words of Khmer. It’s the hardest language we’ve encountered so far. We learned more French, which is saying something. So we wander around with our English and hope to get by.

Which has absolutely not been a problem so far, and no one’s treated us like parasites. I’m not at all suggesting that you should skip Cambodia if you can’t learn Khmer. English is the second language here, after all. It warms my heart to see the French forced to struggle with a foreign language in one of their former colonies.

But the absence of anything like a basic vocabulary in the local tongue definitely makes it feel like we’re careening about, heedless of the locals and demanding to be met on our terms. We’re headed to Vietnam next, which uses a Latin alphabet, so that helps. But it’s a tonal language, which I’m pretty sure is going to fuck us up. The journey continues.

The Apsara Theater experience required checking our shoes at the door. There was something deliciously illicit about being barefoot in a public space. It felt naughty.

The evening featured traditional Khmer cuisine and dances in three genres: traditional Apsara, village dances, and Reamker dances. Here’s the thing about all three styles. They’re all, for different reasons, ex post facto manufactured culture. They are authentic because Cambodians have all agreed that they are.

But the history of Cambodian dance is the history of Cambodia, with all of its triumphs and tragedies. Let’s start with the Apsara.

That’s the reason the dances are so slow. They’re basically choreographed to move from one Apsara pose to another. The dances as originally conceived have become set in stone, like the temple carvings that were their source material, replicated perfectly down to the last precise finger curl.

An entire culturally resonant art form built on grade school children voguing for the queen. You can’t make that shit up.

Our visit to Angkor Wat was after this performance, so we had an excellent context for viewing the wealth of Apsaras that pavé the temple. The dances made so much sense after viewing the actual carvings. Obviously, no one knows the exact shape of the original Apsara dances, but you can certainly see how the modern form plausibly derived from the source material.

The village folk dances performed today are also creations. As the dances died at their source, teachers and professional dancers recreated them in the 60s in order to preserve them. But these dances are an interpretation of the originals, documented and locked down to be unchanging over time. They are not genuine in the sense we usually give to that word. Many of them don’t even qualify as recreations, as they were conceived from whole cloth by city choreographers imagining village life. Even those have become part of the official canon of Cambodian dance.

The Reamker stories are like the rest of the Hindu narrative canon: stuffed full. They read like they were written by a coked up middle schooler. “*sniff* OK, so this shapeshifting demon he’s got like, ten heads, and he falls in love with a pretty human princess and abducts her. *sniff* And then, and then, this monkey god, who has, like powers, comes to help with his army of monkeys *sniff* but he’s met by like an army of mermaids, so the monkeys and the mermaids have a war, *sniff* but then the monkey god and the mermaid queen fall in love. *sniff* They rescue the pretty human princess, but the prince thinks she did it with the demon, but she didn’t. *sniff* He’s just a dick. *sniff* And there’s a giant. *sniff*”

Which is the actual plot of the Reamker. And is hardly special to the Hindus and Buddhists. Hand a coked up middle schooler the Bible and see what you get. Everyone’s creation myths are… logically suspect. Don’t even get me started on Turtle Island.

Whether imagined from stone carvings, created by modern choreographers, or established as legitimate court art, all of the Cambodian dance forms share something in common. They were destroyed by Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge in 1975. All forms of pre-revolutionary art were banned, including and explicitly traditional dance. 80-90% of the entire Cambodian population of writers, artists, and dancers died in the first three years of the regime, either by starvation or execution.

Cambodian dance today is a shadow of a shadow, recreated forms that had to be painstakingly recreated again, by the few dancers who survived the regime. It’s a funny cultural patrimony, making up in a stubborn insistence on its relevance what it lacks in authenticity. Maybe it’s made up, but they’re claiming it as their own and fuck you if you have a problem with that.

I do not. The beauty of Cambodian dance isn’t in its historical accuracy, but in the fierce commitment of Cambodians to, finally, speak for themselves.

Shadow Puppets

Guess what? Traditional Cambodian shadow puppet theater was also destroyed by the Khmer Rouge and manually recreated by the few surviving practitioners after the regime fell. So it enjoys the same “authenticity” issues as the dances, or, honestly, every other fucking art form here, all of which the Khmer Rouge methodically burnt to the ground.

Of course, as is the case all over the world, “traditional” art forms don’t have to be murdered. They can die of natural causes. Even before the execution, shadow puppet theater was declining in Cambodia, as a natural byproduct of the distractions and allure of creeping modernity. New is shinier and better than old.

But I think we make a category error when we fetishize authenticity. Culture is a living organism, and while we are right to preserve what UNESCO refers to as Intangible Cultural Heritage, we are wrong to insist that it be preserved in amber. Cultural change is a form of agency, permitting peoples to decide for themselves what matters and what doesn’t.

There’s no question that pre-revolutionary shadow puppet shows enjoyed a wide range of content, but the version we have today, recreated by the few shattered puppeteers who survived the purge, is limited to retellings of the stories in the Reamker. I suspect that’s because those were the puppets that made it through the civil war intact, either through random dumb luck or a concerted effort to prioritize the safety of the Reamker puppets.

There are two styles of shadow puppet theater, both done with puppets made of punched leather. There’s Sbek Thom, which uses large static leather sheets manipulated with sticks, and Sbek Touch, which uses smaller, articulated puppets with movable limbs and changeable facial expressions.

These days, no one does the full Reamker story, which historically played out in villages over seven or more nights by traveling puppeteer troupes. We get excerpts now, which is fine. As tourists go, we have a pretty substantial attention span, but not like that.

An Australian And A Malaysian Walk Into Cambodia

There are several established shadow puppet troupes in Cambodia, two in Siem Reap and one in Phnom Penh, but none of them have regular venues. They mostly tour. While there are multiple dinner theaters offering Apsara dances in Siem Reap, there is only one venue for shadow puppets, the Bambu Stage, which offers a couple of shows a week and has their own troupe of puppeteers they’ve trained themselves.

We got there early and had a long chat with the proprietress, who shared their history. Her husband is a Malaysian event planner who worked with an Australian theatrical producer and museum exhibition designer. They had worked together for some years in Australia, gotten bored, and were looking for something fresh.

They thought there was opportunity in Southeast Asia and picked Cambodia seemingly at random. They bought a restaurant and converted it into a shadow puppet theater for tourists, and then hired and trained puppeteers to perform.

But here’s the kicker. They then wrote their own shadow puppet plays.

Before the performance I asked our hostess about the Reamker plays, and she said they didn’t do those. They did a little twirling about with the large Sbek Thom puppets at the very beginning, but then switched to the smaller Sbek Touch puppets for the full performance. I asked what the source material was for the play, and the answer was village stories.

This turned out to be a village story like the ones from the Apsara dance performance: completely made up. But worse in this case, because it was made up by an Australian and a Malaysian.

It’s hard to know which was worse. The cultural appropriation that rendered the performance an unmistakable act of minstrelsy, the participation of actual Cambodians in said act, or the fact that it was aggressively, irredeemably bad.

The plot of this village story, which could have had some origins in the villages, although the shadow puppet version we saw was from whole cloth, was thus: A shrewish wife orders her husband to take their buffalo to the rice paddies for water. On the way he meets a drunk who also has a buffalo. They share drink and wager about whose buffalo is stronger. The drunk puts up his rice paddy. The other man puts up his wife. The buffalos fight, and the drunk’s buffalo kills the other buffalo. They return to the village so the drunk can claim the shrewish wife as his own, and she beats both men until they run away.

This was framed to us before it began as a feminist parable about the strength of women in the household. Sure. But that wasn’t its worst sin. There was ten, maybe fifteen minutes of story that had been padded out to almost an hour. I didn’t know it was possible to be both limp and overstuffed at the same time. I mean as a person, sure. I’ve been in that condition repeatedly. But I’m not used to culture shaped that way.

The puppets were fine and the puppeteers did what they could with the material. But we felt a little dirty afterwards. Even the most careful of travelers can be tourist trapped.

Afterwards they let us play with the puppets, which was fun. Sadly, that’s about as far as the fun went for this experience.