Khmer Arts Academy

Long Beach, California

Mission

The Khmer Arts Academy is a public benefit organization dedicated to fostering the vitality of Cambodian arts and culture across borders and to expanding the role arts and culture play in the development and well being of young people and of society as a whole. The Academy sees itself as a nexus of arts and culture in a community that is endow ed with wonderful traditions and that is looking for ways of using those traditions to improve its quality of life. Through its numerous activities, it seeks to create a continuum of recruitment, training, outreach, creation, performance and documentation that develops accomplished artists, exquisite works of art and diverse, informed audiences.

Classical Dance Training & Performance Program

Providing multifaceted instruction and performance opportunities in Cambodian classical dance, in Long Beach and Cambodia.

Community Context

Following the 1979 collapse of the Khmer Rouge “Killing Fields,” hundreds of thousands of Cambodian refugees fled their native land and were resettled across four continents. Approximately 150,000 immigrated to the USA through the 1980s. Being home to about a third of them, Long Beach now claims the largest concentration of Cambodians outside of Southeast Asia. According to the United Way of Greater Los Angeles, Cambodians are the poorest and least educated Asian Pacific Islander community in Los Angeles County. The 2000 Census reports that only the Hmong are faring worse nationwide. And a recent RAND Corp. report indicates high rates of mental illness among “Killing Fields” survivors, including a rate of post-traumatic stress disorder that is higher than that found among combat veterans. As a result, the Cambodian community has remained economically, politically, and culturally isolated from mainstream society.

Despite low achievement in many areas, Cambodians have an ancient and rich tradition in the performing arts, which they have long used as a means of coping and revitalization. These thousand-year-old forms of dance and music, which trace their origins to the sandstone temples of ancient Angkor, represent what is positive about Cambodian culture, and their practice and performance allow Cambodians everywhere to demonstrate that this heritage includes more enduring legacies than auto-genocide.

During the Khmer Rouge era (1975-1979), classical dance was banned and as many as 90 percent of the dance’s practitioners perished from disease, overwork, starvation and slaughter. In the immediate aftermath of this devastation, a small number of survivors returned to Phnom Penh and eagerly trained a new generation of performers that was soon touring the country and abroad. At the same time, hundreds of thousands of Cambodians fled war and poverty for teeming refugee camps along the Thai border. Under the leadership of surviving teachers, each camp formed a dance troupe (or troupes) and performances became an important part of camp life. When Cambodian refugees were resettled abroad, these new practitioners formed dance troupes in their adopted communities. Dance that, until recently, had been performed rarely outside royal palace walls, now became a powerful expression for all Cambodians as they sought to embrace the positive aspects of their culture and affirm and transmit their identity.

Of particular importance to the Academy is how 1.5 and second generation Cambodian Americans use these exquisite traditions to articulate their aesthetics in an increasingly global cultural conversation and to develop a sense of excellence and accomplishment.

Classical Dance Training & Performance Program

The Classical Dance Training & Performance Program is a natural extension of work that Khmer Arts Academy founding artistic director, Sophiline Cheam Shapiro, has been conducting since 1991, when she immigrated to Southern California from her native Cambodia. Teaching dance to a group of students in a large Cambodian-populated apartment complex in the Van Nuys section of Los Angeles, then at a Buddhist temple in Echo Park and as part of a Southeast Asian health project in Long Beach, she was eventually invited by one of the larger social service organizations serving the Long Beach community to take over a moribund arts program there. In 1999, she established ongoing performing arts programming and within three years recruited more than fifty students, who were presenting more than 20 public performances per year. She built a sizable costume collection and quadrupled the program’s budget. The program also included author readings and book signings, as well as public music recitals. In 2002, a financial collapse and an unsympathetic leadership change at the organization prompted her to establish a separate 501(c)(3), the Khmer Arts Academy, that would provide more flexible and efficient tools for funding and administering this and other projects.

The Cambodian community of Long Beach has a poor history of incorporating arts programming into its social service institutions. The reasons are no doubt numerous and include a culture of suspicion engendered by the Khmer Rouge experience, a lack of administrative transparency, as well as a lack of healthy mechanisms for conflict resolution. Other factors include a lack of enthusiasm (and expertise) among artists to incorporate social service outcomes within their artistic programs (e.g., preventing teen pregnancy and gang violence, increasing literacy), thereby requiring an engagement with different and potentially unfamiliar funding streams (at least to social service organizations). Another factor, and certainly a major reason for the establishment of the Khmer Arts Academy, is conflicting perceptions of how arts should be taught, performed and presented in the community, whether an institution and its leaders see traditional dance as a living art form or as ethnostalgic decoration. Not surprisingly, the largest and most successful Cambodian arts programs in the country, including the Angkor Dance Troupe in Lowell, Massachusetts, and Cambodian-American Heritage, Inc., in Washington, DC, as well as the Khmer Arts Academy, have no administrative affiliation with a social service organization.

Along with her husband, John Shapiro, Sophiline incorporated the Khmer Arts Academy in 2002, bringing many of the students and artists from the program she had founded at the social service organization as the core of the Classical Dance Training & Performance Program. Initially using donated community space in a Cambodian church and later a hospital, the organization established its own 2200 square foot “Cambodia Town” studio in early 2005. The program offers free, year-round after-school and weekend workshops in classical dance. The workshops are organized by student age (K-5; grade 5 and above) and last two hours each session. They serve approximately 50 students, most of whom are between the ages of 5 and 18 (though they include adult learners too). The program also includes 12 to 20 public performances per year.

The Classical Dance Training & Performance Program teaches apprentice dancers the basic movements and traditional repertory of Cambodian classical dance. In addition, students learn traditional costuming techniques (the Academy maintains one of the finest and largest classical dance costume collections in the world) and mythology and folklore and receive coaching in punctuality, grooming, presentation and stagecraft. Due to the broad scope of the Khmer Arts Academy’s work, the Program is also able to offer its students unique opportunities. These include learning and performing original dances created by Sophiline Cheam Shapiro for Cambodia’s finest professional artists and toured to major stages throughout the world, and participating in master classes with visiting professional artists from Cambodia’s Royal University of Fine Arts and National Theater.

Students in the Classical Dance Training & Performance Program receive between twelve and twenty opportunities each year to perform in public at community-based celebrations, festivals, museums, universities and major venues. Regular performances include the Cambodian New Year Celebration at El Dorado Park, the Cambodia Town New Year Parade, and Cambodian Student Society of Cal State Long Beach’s Culture Show. In recent years, the Program has presented full concerts at major venues including the Aratani/Japan America Theater, the John Anson Ford Amphitheater, Grand Performances, and the Keck Amphitheater of Walt Disney Concert Hall. Performance opportunities allow students to demonstrate their skills, gain confidence as performers and participate in the ongoing conversation of American culture.

Due to the size of its Cambodian population, Long Beach has become the de facto capital of the Cambodian diaspora, exerting political, economic, and cultural influence on Cambodian communities throughout the world, as well as on the Motherland. The Khmer Arts Academy is an organization that was born in and emerged from the Greater Long Beach Cambodian community, and, reflecting the dynamic of its community, its work reaches and influences Cambodia and every corner of the diaspora. Its programs include the Khmer Arts Ensemble, a professional international touring ensemble based in Takhmao, Cambodia, that specializes in presenting the original choreography of Sophiline Cheam Shapiro as well as rarely performed work from the classical canon. The Academy produces media projects, including video documentaries, that contextualize its work. And, as of 2008, it has initiated a research and archiving program, which aims to document the Ensemble’s work as well as train writers who can explore and respond to Cambodian dance.

Operating over such vast geographic terrain presents its challenges, not the least of which is creating a system by which the Academy’s many activities can inform and enhance each other. To this end, the Training & Performance Program in Long Beach is establishing rotating year-long residencies for artists of the Khmer Arts Ensemble, allowing them to teach in the community and develop their skills as leaders. Also in 2008, the Academy is establishing its Summer Institute in Cambodia, a three-week intensive training and cultural immersion program for Cambodian dance students from around the world (including the Long Beach-based Training & Performance Program).

Over the course of sixteen years, the Classical Dance Training & Performance Program and its earlier manifestations have set a standard for how dance in the Cambodian communities of Southern California is taught, performed and presented. Some of its students have gone on to win awards for their dancing and other artistic endeavors, and a generation of them has now taken leadership positions within the organization. Some have formed their own troupes. Whether as a result of the Program’s own efforts or the efforts of others who respond to its work, the number of dancers, ensembles, and public presentations in Long Beach and elsewhere have increased, the repertory has expanded, and the quality of costuming has improved. Perhaps more importantly, the Program has demonstrated that classical dance can be seen as a living and contemporary expression of a diasporic culture’s aesthetics rather than as ethnostalgia.

Learn more

The Academy’s musical recordings, a coffee-table-format photo essay and a stunning documentary, Seasons of Migration , by ethnographic filmmaker John Bishop are available at www.khmerartsacademy.org .

For an excellent study of how dance is practiced and perceived in the Cambodian community of Long Beach, read Colin Pearson’s M.A. thesis Harihara at the Beach: Finding Equilibrium through Dance in a Cambodian Diaspora Community, University of California, Riverside, 2006.

Mosaic: Fragments of a City is an eight-screen video installation by Ladan Yalzadeh and Ann Kaneko at the Skirball Museum and Cultural Center in Los Angeles that explores five distinct ways heritage is transmitted to family and community, including the Khmer Arts Academy’s Classical Dance Training & Performance Program.

Apsara performed by program students at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion as part of the Los Angeles County Holiday Celebration and broadcast nationally on PBS in December 2007. Available on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18y4UUdUhx4 .

Access the recent RAND Corp. report about mental illness among “Killing Fields” survivors: “Mental Health of Cambodian Refugees 2 Decades After Resettlement in the United States,” Grant N. Marshall, PhD; Terry L. Schell, PhD; Marc N. Elliott, PhD; S. Megan Berthold, PhD; Chi-Ah Chun, PhD, Journal of the American Medical Association . Aug 3, 2005; vol. 294:571-579.

Contact

Ms. Serey Tep, Managing Director

Khmer Arts Academy

375 Redondo Avenue, Suite 156

Long Beach, CA 90814

562-472-0090

serey (at) khmerartsacademy.org

Photo

Sophy Julie Nuth and Program students performing “Apsara” at Grand Performances, July 2004.

Photo, Michael Burr, courtesy Khmer Arts Academy.

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