Debt Hamstrings Dance Troupe From Cambodian Refugee Camp : Tour: After just four performances, a failed publicity effort has put the performers more than $56,000 in the red and left the 55-member company crowded into two county homes.

Having fled their Cambodian homeland, Meas Van Roen and his ballerina wife, Voan Savoy, settled in a refugee camp on the Thai border more than a decade ago to resuscitate what they feared was a dying culture.

There, in dirt-floor huts with occasional mortar fire exploding around them, they fashioned an exposition of Cambodian dance and music worthy of export.

When the dance troupe Angkor Dreams finally arrived in Southern California last month, a 19-city tour lay ahead, with stops at the United Nations, Constitution Hall in Washington and three nights at Walt Disney World.

But just four performances into the tour, a failed publicity effort has rung up more than $56,000 in debt, stopped the tour cold and left the 55-member company crowded into two Orange County homes, confused and longing for home.

“All they (the group) wanted was to show the world that despite their hardships, they had worked hard to preserve their culture,” said Evelyne Sak, who helped organize the tour in Thailand and invested more than $16,000 in the group’s expenses. “All we wanted to do was promote the culture. But the people just didn’t seem to know we were coming.”

Sak said the group, whose membership ranges from 10 to 60 years old, had been discovered in a Cambodian refugee camp outside of Bangkok.

The group was later brought to Bangkok, where their dancing and musical depiction of Cambodian village life had been the subjects of command performances for government officials, Sak said.

In the United States, however, the troupe has performed to near-vacant theaters and auditoriums--twice in Long Beach and for separate shows in Fresno and San Diego. The troupe lost up to $15,000 a night by some accounts.

The troupe was supposed to depart Orange County for Walt Disney World in Florida on Wednesday, but those plans were scrapped Tuesday.

Now, instead of looking at America from Disney World hotel rooms, the dancers and musicians have been staging nightly slumber parties in Sak’s Anaheim home, where the group’s 29 women and girls have been living, and in Mission Viejo, where local businessman Ted Ngoy has opened his home to 26 men and boys.

“I am happy to have them here,” Ngoy said Wednesday, watching the group mill about his pool. “I feel like they are all my children. But today most are upset and crying. They feel like their situation is hopeless.”

The group was scheduled to depart the United States on Nov. 3, after concluding the tour in New York, but the troupe will instead leave from Orange County sometime next month--after sizeable debts are settled.

“We have to honor our debts,” Sak said, adding that much of the funding came in the form of loans from individuals in Thailand and the Cambodian-American communities of Orange County and Long Beach.

“We need the money to pay back the air fare,” she said. “We couldn’t have come here without that money.”

Since the group’s last performance Sept. 19, Sak and Ngoy, who helped raise $22,000 to pay for part of the troupe’s travels, have been working to stage benefit performances in the area aimed at lessening the debt burden.

The first is scheduled at 7 p.m. today at the Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace in Yorba Linda. This weekend, the troupe will move on to Long Beach for four performances--two each on Saturday and Sunday--at the Long Beach Convention Center Theater. Saturday performances are scheduled at 2 and 8 p.m., Sunday at 1 and 6 p.m.

Sak said the failure of the tour is particularly painful for Savoy and Van Roen, the founders of Angkor Dreams, who have accompanied the troupe to the United States.

Savoy, Sak said, left her position as a ballerina with the Khmer Royal Corps Ballet to join Van Roen in their journey out of Cambodia to the refugee camp in Thailand 10 years ago.

For Ngoy and Sak, life with the new guests has been rewarding but difficult. While the Cambodian communities in Orange County and Long Beach have rallied to ship in daily supplies of familiar foods, the group has also been subsisting on all-American delicacies, such as hamburgers and hot dogs.

In Anaheim, Sak said, she has simply cleared her four-bedroom home of most furniture to accommodate the female members.

“The washer, dryer, television and videos are running all the time,” Sak said. “Most of them are children, and they have to be entertained.”

At bedtime, the floors are transformed to sleeping quarters, as most prefer to grab pillows and wrap themselves in blankets for the night.

“I’m trying to educate them as we go,” she said. “But just riding in an elevator is a new experience. They had never been on an airplane, and they cannot get used to the food here. You’ve got to remember, they are used to small huts with dirt floors, not real homes.”

At Ngoy’s spacious Mission Viejo residence, the scene is basically the same, although guests have been able to use the family’s pool and fish at Lake Mission Viejo.

“They are so disciplined,” Ngoy said. “I have asked them to make themselves at home.”

Yet signs of the troupe’s precarious situation are evident throughout Ngoy’s home. Stacks of luggage and clothing just about fill one large room, and the younger members have been suffering tearful bouts of homesickness and confusion.

At one point Wednesday, about 20 troupe members huddled in the home’s large recreation room, visibly worried, with some crying over their plight.

Sak said the troupe has been rehearsing, but they are eager to begin performing again.

“They feel a little bit lost here,” Sak said. “Deep down they are still dancers, they are professionals. Away from the stage, they are just children.”