Chheng Phon

Cambodian dramatist and educator who rebuilt the country's arts schools and performing arts repertoire after the Khmer Rouge period.

Creator details
Khmer name	ឆេង ផុន
Also known as	Chheng Pon
Roles	Educator; Tradition bearer; Author; Scholar
Based in	Cambodia
Recognition	Grand Prize of the Fukuoka Asian Cultural Prizes (https://fukuoka-prize.org/en/laureates/detail/66265767-0cd7-48f6-bd72-8e7608a63510)
Subjects	Dance & Theatre; Literature & Storytelling; History & Remembrance; Community & Civic Life

Chheng Phon (ឆេង ផុន) was a Cambodian dramatist, theater director and teacher who helped rebuild Cambodia's arts schools after the Khmer Rouge years. He founded the Khmer Folklore Troupe in 1964, led the Khmer Artists' Association from 1972 and later served as Minister of Culture and Information. He wrote four yike and five lakhon bassac stories for the stage and received the Grand Prize of the Fukuoka Asian Cultural Prizes. He died in 2016.

Early life and training

Chheng Phon was born in Kompong Cham Province. He worked his way through school and graduated from the Teacher's School of the Ministry of National Education. He studied to become a teacher in 1955, then went to China on a scholarship and finished his studies there in 1960.

In the late 1950s he was a 27-year-old clown studying dance at the Chan Chhaya pavilion of the Royal Palace, where he learned the dances of the Royal Ballet of Cambodia. He was a scholar as well as a comic actor and dancer, and he wanted to know classical dance in body and spirit as well as in the mind. Each day he trained beside eight-year-old girls and learned every role. Queen Kossamak encouraged him and told colleagues she had found a strong candidate for the expert professor of dance she hoped to develop.

Career

After 1960 he began working at the Royal University of Fine Arts in Phnom Penh, and he taught there as a full professor from 1968. In 1964 he founded the Khmer Folklore Troupe. In 1970 he led a Cambodian dance troupe to the Osaka International Exposition in Japan. He became president of the Khmer Artists' Association in 1972.

Chheng Phon led Cambodia's National Conservatory of Spectacles. There he worked to save Cambodian puppet theater by supporting performers and collecting musical scores, and he encouraged young people to take up the traditional performing arts. His time at the head of the conservatory is dated to the 1960s by Cultural Survival and the Angkor Database, and to 1973 by Wikipedia.

In the 1970s he started a performing arts "farm" outside Phnom Penh. There students from the University of Fine Arts trained in traditional dance drama while they raised vegetables, chickens and pigs. His troupe of those years created four yike and five lakhon bassac stories. He also planned an Artist Village to show Cambodian customs through handicrafts, dance and music, but the war stopped the project.

The Khmer Rouge years

During Democratic Kampuchea (1975 to 1979), Chheng Phon hid his identity and passed as a peasant. He was sent to forced labor on a collective farm in Kompong Thom Province. In a 1989 interview he said: "I am a writer, and yet I cannot find words to describe the Pol Pot regime." He also said that only 300 scholars were still alive in Cambodia when he returned in 1979, and that fewer than 10 teachers of apsara dance were still living, all in their sixties and seventies.

Rebuilding the arts

After the fall of the Khmer Rouge, the new Ministry of Information and Culture brought surviving dancers together, and Chheng Phon gathered musicians, dancers and shadow players who had survived to train in the traditional arts. He founded a school of fine arts for children orphaned in the conflict. In 1981 he was named director of the School of Fine Arts, which he reopened in Phnom Penh to gather artists scattered across the country and train a new generation of dancers. A Cultural Survival article dates the reopening of the University of Fine Arts under his direction to January 1981. He went on recruiting dancers after many artists had left their professions. In May 1989 he met the former dancer Roeung Savath at a market and persuaded her to come back to the troupe.

In 1981 he was appointed deputy minister in the People's Republic of Kampuchea. Wikipedia calls him the first person without a revolutionary or communist background named to a party leadership post. In 1982 he became Minister of Culture, and Wikipedia gives his term as running to 1991. In that post he balanced Khmer traditions with the political program of the government, as artists were urged "to adapt the tradition to modern times." He was an expert consultant on Nine Levels of Hell, a Czech-Cambodian film of 1987. Once a month he came to the University of Fine Arts to give half-day lectures, colloquia and classes on nationalism, socialism, artistic ideals and art in general, often holding up Angkor Wat as the model of Khmer tradition.

In 1989 he reopened the University of Fine Arts in Phnom Penh, the former Royal University of Fine Arts, to preserve Cambodia's tangible and intangible heritage. He reopened its archaeology and architecture departments to train young specialists to preserve and restore the Angkor monuments. The same year he told the classical ballet to revive all 18 of its forms. In December 1989, as Minister of Information and Culture, he said Cambodia was trying to preserve all its monuments and had asked the world for help restoring them. On August 5, 1990, he resigned as Minister for Culture for health reasons. He received the First Honor Medal for Edification and Preservation of Khmer Culture of the People's Republic of Kampuchea in 1989.

Later life

After he withdrew from most political work in 1992, he used his own money to set up the Center for Culture and Vipassana at his home on the edge of Phnom Penh. The center had begun in the late 1980s as a place for artists to study meditation in relation to performance. There he worked to revive Khmer virtue and spirit and to heal troubled minds through meditation.

In 1993 he traveled to California and helped former Cambodian students recreate the Khmer Royal Ballet in an auditorium at California State University, Long Beach. The same year he joined Cambodia's National Council of Culture. A shadow-play and traditional dance troupe he led performed in New York in 1993; the Fukuoka Prize citation says the performance won high acclaim for celebrating the rebirth of Cambodia.

In 1997 he became chairman of Cambodia's National Election Committee. On March 7, 1998, he signed a $25.8 million contract with a private company, Ciccone, to stage the elections. International observers, including Human Rights Watch, valued his neutrality, and the Asian Network for Free Elections credited him with helping deploy independent observers.

He mentored a generation of Khmer artists, among them Pech Tum Kravil. He died on December 22, 2016, in Ta Khmau, Kandal Province.

Views

At international meetings, including the Japan Foundation's Symposium on Angkor, he argued that cultural restoration in Cambodia is a spiritual restoration. He opposed a five-star hotel near the Angkor monuments. He proposed small guesthouses, horse-drawn carts as the only taxis, modern towns 50 km (31 mi) away, and no airport close to the site, warning that jet vibrations shake the monuments' foundations. He also proposed museums that keep culture in place among the people, and he said that the government tried to preserve the culture of every ethnic minority, even one of only 30 families.

Works and recognition

Chheng Phon produced and performed original plays based on folktales and village dances handed down by oral tradition. The Fukuoka Prize credits his published works, performances and dialogues with helping Cambodians rediscover Khmer values. He received the Grand Prize of the Fukuoka Asian Cultural Prizes in 1997, at the eighth presentation of the prizes.

His writings include:

• Primary Studies on Khmer Arts and Culture (1966)
• The Khmer Folk Arts: Khmer Music and Dance (1967)
• The Real Value of Khmer Arts and Culture (1968)
• The Khmer Shadow Play (1973)
• Formula for Leading and Governing Khmer Culture and Arts (1981)
• Perspectives on Khmer Culture in the Years 2000 (1985)
• Pu-kun: A Real Khmer Fanner, a work of spoken theater (1990)
• Khmer Lives, Arts, and Culture (1994)
• Peacebuilding Through Culture and Cooperation (1994)
• Master and Follower (1994)
• Combating Corruption Through the Promotion of Khmer Morality, Virtue and Wisdom (1994)
• 40 Questions, 40 Answers (1995)
• The Tenfold Conducts of Khmer-Human Leaders during Angkorean Period (1995)
• The Seven Stages of Purification (1995)
• Religion, Culture and Development (1996)

Works

• Cambodian classical dance (Tradition)
• Trot (Tradition)

See also

• Royal Ballet of Cambodia
• Cambodian classical dance
• All creators

References