DANCE REVIEW / L.A. FESTIVAL : Cambodian Troupe’s Artistry

Dressed in white and gold, Yim Devy glides away from four women in red toward the front of the stage at the Los Angeles State and County Arboretum. The sound of a wooden xylophone hovers close to her as she rises and sinks on one leg, her head nodding delicately, her hands smoothing the air--palms open, fingers curled back in an arc that nearly reaches the wrist.

She is Mera, the Apsara (heavenly dancer) who is the mother of Cambodia and, in Devy’s performance, she embodies all the majesty and eloquence of a culture that has always seemed something of a miracle. Carrying golden branches and smiling from the depths of an eternal calm, she soothes the eye and warms the heart--making into an improbable fiction everything we know about killing fields, puppet governments and last-chance coalitions.

Later in this program by the Classical Dance Company of Cambodia, Devy appears in a one-act, tab version of “The Ramayana,” surprising us with the rebellion in her portrayal of the abducted, brutalized Sita. However drastic the abridgement, and despite vacant, perfunctory performances by some of her colleagues, she connects us to the profound feeling of violation in this ancient Hindu epic.

Suddenly, the Cambodian holocaust becomes a kind of subtext, and we start taking this ritualized conflict between good and evil very personally. Consider the ending: Rama and Sita standing together with everyone else weeping. No spectacle. No reminder that Rama is a god. Just a devastating intimacy--the look of a family reunion after calamity or long separation--and a feeling of sweet relief.

Other ways of presenting “The Ramayana” occur on the six-part Los Angeles Festival program. At the start of the evening, for example, we find nine men carrying large, intricately incised leather puppets that represent characters from the epic. Sometimes the puppets become silhouettes in front of a backlit cloth panel, sometimes shadows from behind it.

In this idiom, a story is less told than illustrated by emblematic arrangements of the figures--but the performers do continually enhance the tableaux. There’s even a battle that begins with puppets being slammed together and then develops into a puppetless martial arts duet.

Male and female styles (or realms) of dancing contrast throughout the program--the men’s gymnastic combat in “The Battle at Night” versus the women’s elegant serenity in the ceremonial “Happiness of the Gods,” for instance.

In the sacred “Moni Mekhala” duet, however, this contrast becomes a statement about forces forever in opposition, as we see an ogre (definitely male, though danced by a woman) attempting to seduce and then subdue a goddess.

He fails, through not definitively, and each of their potentially destructive skirmishes brings the rain that renews life. Their conflict is a creative act, with Cambodian existence depending on it.

Once again, a centuries-old cultural artifact gains new immediacy as artists who recently suffered near-extinction now labor to reconstruct a culture that takes the most positive view imaginable of eternal war.

A note about the company: This is not the National Dance Company of Cambodia but, rather, a troupe from the University of Fine Arts in Phnom Penh. Even to a non-specialist, the dancers revealed consistent weaknesses in both technique (especially problems of balance) and expressivity on Thursday.

Give them time. Right now, it’s their spirit, style and repertory that dazzle us--and, of course, we can’t help but see them as freed hostages, frail yet incomparably beautiful for surviving so much. They bring us jewels from the ashes and we recognize the value of the gift.