Creator
Em Theay
Master of the Royal Ballet of Cambodia who taught Khmer classical dance and traditional singing to postwar generations.
Em Theay (died 2021) was a master of the Royal Ballet of Cambodia who taught Khmer classical dance and its traditional singing to generations of students.[1][2] She was known by the title Neak Krou, master teacher. In 2012 King Norodom Sihamoni named her one of Cambodia's first seventeen Living Human Treasures.[1]
Life
At the age of seven, Em Theay was noticed by Queen Sisowath Kossamak, who was reviving Khmer traditional dance in the 1940s, and she began training as a classical dancer for the Royal Court.[3][4] She grew up among the dancers on the palace grounds and never went to school. Instead she learned all the songs and gestures of classical dance, and in time she became a teacher with the Royal Court Ballet.[5] She mastered the Yeak, or Giant, character in the Ramayana dance, a role traditionally played by a strong woman whose gestures project power.[3][6] Among her students was Princess Norodom Buppha Devi.[6]
Under the Khmer Rouge, Em Theay was persecuted for being an artist.[7] She was forced to go to Battambang Province, where she took on a false identity and worked in the fields. There she looked after children and sang them to sleep.[6][5] She was often called "the Tenth Dancer" because she was among the ten percent of palace artists who survived.[3] When the regime fell in 1979, she answered a loudspeaker call for dancers and performers to help rebuild Cambodian culture and walked 170 miles (274 kilometers) back to Phnom Penh.[3][5] There she found that ninety percent of her colleagues had disappeared and that most of the country's cultural treasures had been destroyed.[5]
Reunited with Sok Chea, she gathered as many surviving dancers as she could and began teaching the old stories and traditions again.[5] She spent the rest of her life reviving the dance and passing on its gestures.[3] She died in her sleep in Phnom Penh on June 15, 2021, at the age of 88.[3]
Teaching
Em Theay taught at the National Theatre and the Faculty of Fine Arts, and she trained generations of dancers at the Royal University of Fine Arts.[6][2] Her teaching was exact, down to the tilt of a finger and the depth of a gaze.[2] In rehearsals she watched the Yeak dancers closely, corrected their gestures and danced with them to show each precise posture and its meaning.[3] She also sat among the live musicians for hours, playing small cymbals or a wooden clapper and at times singing, most often on the terrace above the Tonle Sap during Bon Om Touk, the Water Festival.[3]
In February 2011 she choreographed the Ramayana dance for the bosbaPANH concert at Angkor.[4] At that concert she danced as a Yeak in front of the Bayon with Preap and Narim, three generations of Yeak dancers together. Narim later said, "If grandma was not here, I would not be here; if she was not here, there would not be any Yeak."[3]
Recognition
Cambodia's Ministry of Culture named Em Theay a Master of Performing Arts.[4] On October 3, 2012, King Norodom Sihamoni nominated her as one of the first seventeen Living Human Treasures of Cambodia, for her performances and her work passing her knowledge to younger generations.[1] From November to December 2015, the National Museum of Cambodia honored her, as "Grand Dame de Dance," with an exhibition of Arjay Stevens's photographs of her from the previous two decades.[8] Stevens met her in 1997 and photographed her for twenty-four years. On January 14, 2026, he gave 66 of those photographs to the Royal University of Fine Arts.[2]
On film and stage
From 1993 on, Em Theay was the subject of documentaries, films and books.[3] She is at the center of the documentary The Tenth Dancer, about a teacher and her pupil leading the rebuilding of classical dance in Phnom Penh.[5] In the documentary performance The Continuum: Beyond The Killing Fields (2001), based on the killing of the royal court dancers under Pol Pot, she tells her own story.[7][9]
Works
- Cambodian classical dance (Tradition)
- Classic song about Reamker by Mr. Sinn Sisamouth, Mrs. Sin Samadekchho, Mrs. Em Theay and other artists (Recording)
See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 UNESCO, In the memory of Neak Krou EM Theay (April 20, 2023)
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 CambodgeMag, Eternal shadows of Em Theay: photographic legacy for Khmer renaissance (January 20, 2026)
- ↑ 3.00 3.01 3.02 3.03 3.04 3.05 3.06 3.07 3.08 3.09 Letters from Laos, Cambodia and beyond, Obituary: EM Theay, the last dancer of Queen Kossomak (June 21, 2021)
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 Bosba Panh, Bosbapanh@Angkor, February 25 to 26, 2011
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 360 Degree Films, The Tenth Dancer (November 23, 2021)
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 Devata.org, Dance of the Gods: interview with Cambodian Princess Buppha Devi
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 T:>Works, The Continuum: Beyond The Killing Fields (October 2001)
- ↑ National Museum of Cambodia, exhibition honoring Em Theay (2015)
- ↑ Numeridanse, The Continuum: Beyond the Killing Fields