Cambodia Dance Troupe Members Request Asylum : Defections: Four dancers from the group, which performed at the L.A. Festival, leave the company while on a U.S. tour.

Four members of the Cambodian Classical Dance Troupe, which performed here in September as part of the Los Angeles Festival before touring other U.S. cities, have left the company and are requesting political asylum, officials with the company confirmed Tuesday.

Eileen Blumenthal, executive producer of the tour, said three dancers defected in St. Paul, where the company had been booked for one performance last Tuesday. One more dancer, Mas Adi Meas, 23, defected in Lowell, Mass., Sunday.

John McAuliff, director of the Philadelphia-based U.S.-Indochina Reconciliation Project, which worked with L.A. Festival officials to secure the entry visas for the company, said he and his associates had talked with all of the defectors, but did not know the true reasons behind their seeking asylum. He said the dancers were citing personal reasons and the difficulty of life in Phnom Penh.

Los Angeles Festival officials could not be reached for comment Tuesday, but both Blumenthal and McAuliff said there were no problems or attempted defections while the group was in Los Angeles. McAuliff also said he had “made clear to them that we would not do anything to stop them from staying here.”

But Narim Kem, editor of the Long Beach-based Cambodian newspaper Serey Pheap, said he had talked with dancers during their L.A. visit who had wanted to defect, but that the security was too tight.

“The festival was very, very careful, and did everything they could to keep them here,” Kem said. “Some of them wanted to escape already, but they didn’t have any opportunity while they were here.”

The company, based in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh, had not appeared in the United States since 1971 because the U.S. government does not recognize the war-torn country or its Vietnamese-installed government. The eight-city U.S. tour--in its final stop with performances through Sunday at New York’s Joyce Theater--was organized after the company was granted its historically important visitors visas for the L.A. Festival performances. The visit marks the first cultural exchange between the U.S. and Cambodia since the Vietnam War.

Blumenthal said that metal detectors will screen the audience at the remaining New York performances, which continue through Sunday.

“Dancers are prisoners with police escorts at all times,” Blumenthal said. “What was so good about the tour was that it rose above factional conflict for the period the company was here; all Cambodians could just celebrate together and forget that they’d been fighting each other for over for 20 years. And now that’s been tainted.”

Susan Reiter contributed to this article.