« I looked at them in ecstasy. [...] When they left, I was in the shadow and the cold, I thought that they carried away the beauty of the world ». In 1906, subjugated by the purity of the dancers of the Royal Cambodian ballet, Rodin was struck by the universality of body language. For the first time, these dancers accompanied King Sisowath outside the palace of Phnom Penh. Rodin gave up everything to rush to the colonial exhibition in Marseille where the latter took place before embarking for Cambodia. Struck by sudden inspiration, the sculptor would have produced in just a week 150 watercolours, some of them passing through the documentary The Beauty of the Gest. Dialogue through the ages and the arts, the film traces the history of a dance once reserved for the Prince and today the popular emblem of Cambodia.
Dance is a silent poetry
While the Enlightenment brothers inaugurated the cinema in 1885 by filming workers at the factory exitIt will not be long before the image of the dancers of the royal ballet is printed on film. From the start, the director Xavier de Lauzanne In 1899 the Enlightenment brothers sent their operator Gabriel Veyre to shoot these images in the French colonial empire. For the first time, the inventors of cinema show the invisible: a dance confined to the Royal Palace of Phnom Penh which suddenly opens to the world. Much later, in the 1960s, this culture will be popularized for the Cambodian people.
Curiosity for a Western public conquered by the spread of Human zoos and exotic exposures which lasted until the 1930s, the gestures and postures of the royal dancers shook the performances during the colonial exhibition in Marseilles. When Interview given at Figaro In 1906, Rodin, still ecstatic, shared his feeling without restraint: « These Cambodian women have given us everything that the Antiquity can contain: their Antique to it that is worth ours. Their arms are stretched out like a cross. They give a movement that snakes from one hand to another through the shoulder blades. They naturally have the notion of harmony and truth or, at least, they have it for them. [...] » He concludes by expressing his pleasure in these terms:
« They learned from the movements I had never met before anywhere, either in the statuary or in nature. For me, I feel that when I look at them, my vision expanded: I saw above and further; Finally, I learned »
At the classic Western dance marked by aerial jumps, Cambodian star dancers offer a much closer show to the ground. The movements are slow, the hands bent back, the back is systematically arched, the knees bent. The centre of gravity is low and the body rotates on the same axis; sometimes a foot detachs from the ground before taking the rest of the leg down from the back. Cambodian dance seeks hyperflexion and seems to push the joints to the breaking point. While one of the legs remains well anchored to the ground, the other half of the body rises.
« The dancer is the point between Earth and Heaven » explains, Sophiline Cheam Shapiro, former dancer and choreographer. « Any idea of line is destroyed is skeleton disappears » adds the ethnologist and photographer George Groslier In 1928, he feared that the colonized people would disappear under the effects of modernity and assimilation. In a heritage logic, he methodically photographed all the dancers' traditional breaks in order to compare the classical dance of his Khmer counterpart.
Angkor one last dance
Dance, whatever it is, produces meaning through its rhythms, movements and gestures. For the royal ballet, it is a language to decipher where the positions of the hands refer to symbols. It is an alchemy born from the observation of nature and magnified by costumes and gilding created by Man. The pieces are simply folded and connected by an ancestral weaving technique. « Where words end, dance begins » explained the contemporary dancer Pina Bausch Wim Wenders paid tribute to him in his eponymous film. The director himself explained the universal language specific to dance: « I didn't need to know the subject of the dance to be able to follow it. She was reduced to a language I could understand. ».
The royal ballet offers an accessible and sensitive spectacle for the neophyte but with a deep scenography whose codes are transmitted by the oral tradition and the memory of the bodies. The dancers divide the roles between two human figures, the prince and the princess, and three dreamlike characters, the giant, the monkey and the peacock. Travel of nearly a century, The Beauty of the Gest We pass through the eras and the key stages of Cambodian dance: the colonial period of the French protectorate, then the 1960s marked by the opening to men for the animal role and the general abandonment of the white shadow. The dancers become more expressive under the influence of the monarchy who wanted to democratize the royal ballet. Although in tradition, Queen Kossamak wanted to modernize the repertoire by opening the royal palace to new girls as boys and adding a note of seduction.
Dance, dance or we're lost
In 1962, the figure of the Apsara of the walls of Angkor became the model chosen for the princess in the feature film Paradise Bird by Marcel Camus. Throughout the report, Xavier de Lauzanne explores the relationship between Cambodia and France, between Art and its mediums: from cinema to dance (and vice versa), from the architecture of Angkor to the incarnation of Apsara, from television to the new dancers who dream of becoming as famous as the princess Norodom Bopha Devi (1943-2019). For it is also the concern for tradition and the passage through Cambodian heritage. More than anything else, it is the existential question of survival after Pol Pot's terror regime and the Khmer genocide that took nearly 90% of the artists. Despite the horrors of history, Cambodian dance has now been protected by Unesco's intangible heritage since 2008.
In Hinduism, an apsara is a heavenly nymph of great beauty. It is said that she is able to change her form at will, to rule over the fortunes of gambling and betting. In the image of this goddess, Cambodian dance resonates as an art that brings tradition to new forms, past and future. It is the figure of the cycle of life that gives birth to the flower and the fruit and which are read on the hands of the dancers. It is also the meaning to give to this image of The Beauty of the Gest where spectators paint dancers in full performance in front The Gate of Hell of Rodin; Gate of Hell, itself understood as a response to the Gate of Paradise by Lorenzo Ghiberti and illustration of the Divine Comedy.
The living show is a portal between the Arts. An image of the documentary that will find its resonance even in the cinema room of the Star Saint-Ex where we attended the preview in Strasbourg. At the end of the screening, two students from Bopha Devi dance school literally died the screen. In front of us, they offered a show. « Is it dance, is it theatre or just life? ? » Would have concluded Pina Bausch if she were still of this world today.
Beauty of the gesture at the cinema 13.03.2024
Finally discovered yesterday, I was taken by the dance as I stayed away from the film proposal and its often too much agreed form. I've only got a hurry now, it's to see what this dance gives when it's in the service of fiction!