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A ROYAL DRAMA
ROBERT TURNBULL MEETS SOME OF THE KEY PLAYERS BEHIND LAOS’ RECENT REVIVAL OF ITS CLASSIC DANCE DRAMA
A special performance outside
the former Royal Palace IN A SOUTH-EAST CORNER of Luang Prabang’s National Museum, in a theatre perched above the city’s bustling night market, a timeless dance-drama is being staged. King Phalam is searching for Queen Sida. Frustrated in his efforts, he summons Hanuman, the monkey king, who enlists the cave-dwelling bird, Sampathy, to escort his army to Longka, where Th otsakan, Sida’s abductor reigns. Sampathy is motivated by revenge: Th otsakan killed his brother.
Performers are accompanied
by traditional instruments This is an episode of the Ramayana; an epic Sanskrit poem written by Valmiki in which gods and monkeys battle demons and ogres, demonstrating supernatural powers as they triumph over evil. What is most significant is that The Search for Sida is a section of the 2,000-year-old narrative that has not been seen in its classical dance form in Laos for almost five decades. War, civil unrest and lack of government support had made this form of entertainment a low priority – until recent years.
Singaporean director
Ong Keng Sen with
one of the cast
members The revival is part of the Continuum Asia Project (CAP), a collaboration between Luang Prabang’s Royal Ballet Th eatre and the Singaporean director of TheatreWorks, Ong Keng Sen.
The initiative was started in 2003 when Ong raised US$6,000 from the Rockefeller Foundation and other sources to facilitate the reconstruction of three episodes of the nine-section “ballet”. His ambitions, however, go deeper: to nurture a new generation of dancers to maintain the integrity of the original narrative, its physical look and gestural meanings.
Ong describes working so closely with the town’s people as a “ritual of community affirmation”.
“In its heyday, the Luang Prabang Ramayana, named locally Phalak Phalam, was something the whole town enjoyed,” he says. “Before the revolution, Luang Prabang had really been an extended family with a king at its head. Today, the king may have gone, but the community still remains.”
COMMUNITY ACTION
The cast on stage There is no question that a revival of this significance could not have happened without the input of surviving older master performers within this community. Th e central figure is Manivong Khattignarath, former manager and artistic director of the 100-strong Royal Ballet in the years leading up to the 1975 revolution.
A sturdy 84-year-old, with an easy smile, Manivong reflects nostalgically about his earlier life in service to the King. During warm April evenings, he and his troupe would perform the Phalak Phalam on the Royal Palace grounds, now the National Museum, for Lao New Year ceremonies.
The Royal Ballet’s
former artistic director,
Manivong Khattignarath It was only in the 1950s, with the arrival of the first tourists to Luang Prabang, that the narrative was crystallised into nine episodes of approximately one hour each. Before this, the entire epic was presented three times a year, he says, amounting to 72 hours over three days.
Other public performances took place at Wat That Luang temple. Five former dancers join Manivong in his desire to restore the integrity of the complete ballet.
However, this is a difficult task. In the absence of any musical or choreographic notation, a project of this kind relies on excavating collective memory. Only a handful of pre-war documents survive, some penned by Manivong himself, with archival photographs, which would have constituted important memory aids, also largely destroyed in the tumult of the revolution.
For the current revival, around 15 surviving musicians have regrouped. However, it is only very recently that the passing on of skills from generation to generation – whether in dancing, singing or music – has been sufficiently addressed. There are now eight older masters or so teaching at least 50 young men and women, most of whom are teenagers.
Tragically, many of these students are unfamiliar with the classic story itself, and evidently have not seen the ballet. For the old political elite mistrusted the Ramayana as a royal story with dangerous symbolism – a story in which kings and queens are given moral strengths and special powers.
Unlike Cambodia, where the return of the monarchy precipitated the rapid revival of the Reamker, it is only recently that the current reform-minded Lao authorities began to recognise and acknowledge the cultural importance of the story.
Even so, says Ong, Luang Prabang’s community of artists acted independently of Vientiane. “The project was driven largely by local pride and would probably not have been possible in the capital,” he says.
With little government support or sponsorship, the steady rise in tourism has been the crucial factor.
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“It is really the power of the economy that has been the catalyst,” explains Ong.
A series of events predating Continuum prove this local commitment. In the 1980s, a committee was set up by the Governor of Luang Prabang to revive the
Episode of the Golden Deer and The Search for Sida. Then, in 1994, Phalak Phalam was introduced into the school curriculum.
Six years later, the Institute of Cultural Research raised US$13,000 from the French government to help disseminate another six sections, although none of these stories were ever performed.
FIT FOR THE FUTURE
The Continuum Asia Project
conducted educational
programmes like this in 22
Luang Prabang schools Ong’s mission is to guarantee a future for the classic. “There is no longer a royal context, but neither is there a popular one,” he says. “Sections of the epic have been revived before and then abandoned. We want this work to become useful and form the basis of a performance repertory – not just kept in a glass case to gather dust until the next time money is needed to bring it out again.”
The younger generation is key; ideally, dancers should start at age three or four, as it takes seven years to learn basic movements. In 2004, Continuum set up theatre-in-education programmes in 22 schools around Luang Prabang. Well-equipped Singaporean film students and musicians arrived for workshops and lengthy dialogue with their Lao counterparts.
Finding little in terms of dance traditions, Ong decided to seek out popular culture to secularise the story.
Preparing for the show
backstage “From being a king and queen, we presented Rama and Sida as two lovers,” he says. “We focused more on the psychology of the characters rather than their blue blood. Rama’s doubts about Sida and her subsequently contemplating suicide were examples of where characters came down from their royal pedestal.”
The result of such efforts has helped the young, re-established Royal Ballet Theatre blossom. The person looking after the local performances is Khoun Chandra Vongsaravanh, a 47-year-old Southern Laotian who returned from 20 years in Europe in 2001 to run Tum Tum Cheng, a guesthouse and cookery school on Luang Prabang’s high street.
Active in numerous heritage revival projects, Chandra persuaded the authorities to reopen the old Royal Palace Th eatre in 2003 and spent his own money to fix it up. His aim is to mount nightly performances of all nine episodes – currently five sections are performed three times a week – using funds from international foundations as well as tourist revenue.
Khoun Chandra
Vongsaravanh spent
his own money to fix
up the old Royal Palace
Theatre For a secure future, however, Chandra, Manivong and his company need to bring their work to the attention of the world. Other than a dribble of philanthropic interest, Laos has yet to benefit from the kind of patronage established in Cambodia in the 1990s and requires investment.
Besides helping to raise money, Ong says he can massage the product, re-invest it with its integrity and some depth, and redefine the link between tourism and art.
“However, it is very much their project,” he declares. “Ultimately, it must be up to the town to decide how to manage, publicise and present, or indeed, preserve this great narrative.”
Royal Ballet Theatre performances Itake place three times a week (Monday, Wednesday, Saturday), at 6:30pm through July and August. The show includes sections from the Lao Ramayana as well as folk and tribal dance. Tickets cost US$8-15 and are available at the entrance on performance days from 9am, or just before the performance. Ticket reservations (for groups) can be made at +856 (0)71 253705, or by fax +856 (0)71 253386 at Tum Tum Cheng (Sakkarin Road, www.tumtumcheng.com).
PICTURES: THEATREWORKS
DOING IT DIFFERENTLY
There is little documentation about any of South-East Asia’s performances of the Ramayana. The first danced version probably emerged from the powerful Khmer empire, but nobody knows when exactly.
After Angkor’s fall in the 15th century, the relocation of Khmer artists and artisans to Ayuthaya enabled the Siamese to develop their own variation on the story, the Ramakien, aspects of which were “re-introduced” to Cambodia during more than 200 years of Siamese hegemony.
But what is being seen in Laos today? It is possible that the first Lao King imported the style from Cambodia in the 15th century, but more probable is that King Chou Anon introduced the Thai version while educated in the Siamese court three centuries later. Interestingly, dancers in Vientiane today perform a ballet close to the more “classical” Ramakien, while Luang Prabang presents something much more closely related to local folk dance traditions.
There are narrative differences in all these versions too.
In the Cambodian and Thai versions, Rama is an incarnation of Vishnu and women dance all roles (apart from the monkeys). However, in the Luang Prabang version, Phalam (Rama) is a manifestation of Buddha, women play female roles, men play male roles, and only men play monkeys.
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