Cambodian Dancers’ U.S. Tour Collapses : Culture: Fifty-five refugees are stuck in two houses in Orange County after publicity campaign fails to draw enough people to performances. Troupe is $56,000 in debt.

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

There, in dirt-floor huts with occasional mortar fire popping 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 Disney World.

But only four performances into the tour, a failed publicity effort has rung up more than $56,000 in debts, stopped the tour cold and left the 55 performers 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 in age from 10 to 60, had been discovered in a Cambodian refugee camp outside of Bangkok. The group was brought to Bangkok, where its dancing and musical depiction of Cambodian village life had been the subjects of command performances for government officials there, Sak said.

In the United States, however, the troupe has performed to near-vacant auditoriums, twice in Long Beach and for separate shows in Fresno and San Diego, losing up to $15,000 a night. The group was supposed to go to Disney World Wednesday, but those plans were scrapped Tuesday.

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

The group was scheduled to leave the United States Nov. 3 after concluding the tour in New York, but will instead leave from Orange County at some point next month after its 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 Southern California.

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

This weekend, the troupe will perform twice on Saturday and twice on Sunday at the Long Beach Convention Center Theater. Performances are scheduled at 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. today and at 1 p.m. and 6 p.m. Sunday.