Voan Savay

Khmer classical dancer and teacher who carried the royal dance repertoire through the refugee camps and into diaspora schools.

Creator details
Khmer name	វ័ន សាវ៉ៃ
Also known as	Savay Voan
Roles	Master practitioner; Tradition bearer; Educator
Based in	Cambodia
Subjects	Dance & Theatre; Migration & Diaspora; History & Remembrance

Voan Savay (វ័ន សាវ៉ៃ) is a Khmer classical dancer and teacher who was prima ballerina of the Khmer Royal Ballet from 1965 to 1970. She carried the dance through the refugee camps on the Thai border and later taught it in France and Cambodia.

The Royal Ballet years

As a young girl in the 1950s, Voan Savay went to the Royal Palace to watch the dancers and practiced with them. She began dancing in the palace in 1960, after Queen Sisowath Kossamak Nearirath opened weekly public classes, and she learned at Chan Chhaya in the palace. Her teachers soon noticed her talent and wanted her in the company. She was active with the Khmer Royal Ballet from 1962 and toured Cambodia with it for performances.

In 1965 she was crowned prima ballerina, the principal dancer, and at times replaced Princess Norodom Buppha Devi. She held the role until 1970, when the royal family fell from power. That same year, 1965, she went on the company's first trip to China. One of her signature dances was Apsara. At first she danced a supporting role to the princess, who was the central apsara, and later she often took the princess's place. In 1971 she was the star Apsara dancer on a tour of the United States. Wikipedia names the touring troupe as the Khmer Royal Ballet. The film's website says the Royal Ballet had by then been replaced by the National Dance Company of Cambodia, which made the tour.

The border camps

Under the Khmer Rouge, Savay stopped practicing her art and hid her background and identity to survive. After the regime fell in 1979 she returned to Phnom Penh. She later said that after the Khmer Rouge she was deeply traumatized and decided to flee. When she reached the border she changed her mind and stayed there to gather children and teach them to dance. "I can die and be reborn, but the art form cannot die," she said.

In 1981 she reached Site II, a refugee camp on the Thai border, and chose to stay and teach the children there to dance. She found more than 100 dancers there and was reunited with Proeung Pruon, a palace musician who had played for her in the 1960s and early 1970s. He and other artists formed a pin peat ensemble, the orchestra for the classical dances, in the Ampil sub-camp. For several years she moved around the border area to organize dance classes in other camps, and her dancers were invited to perform across Thailand. She used the teaching of the royal ballet in the camps to protect the refugees' dignity and rights and to keep their heritage and pride alive.

In the camps Savay began to write down, in narrative form, the gestures and movements of particular characters in the classical repertoire. By 1989 she and Meas Van Roeun were the directors of the Fine Arts Service in the Ampil sub-camp. That year they helped set up a dance and music documentation project that ran for six months, and artists in the camp also recorded camp life with the equipment. She later explained that she had wanted evidence of something that might not be there the next day. In all she spent more than a decade in the camps.

Touring, exile and return

In 1991 Savay took a large group of dancers, musicians and costume makers on a three-month tour of the United States, and during the tour she helped set up the Khmer Royal Ballet in California. Accounts of her return differ. The film's website says she went back to Cambodia later in 1991 and that she and her troupe joined the Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts. A 2021 essay places her among the camp residents repatriated to Cambodia in 1992 and 1993.

She left Cambodia again after the 1997 coup, or after the political turmoil of 1998 in another account, and found asylum in France. There she taught Cambodian traditional dance for two decades to the Cambodian community of the Paris region. From 2005 she helped Cambodian associations in the Paris region and in Montreal, among them Selepak-Khmer and Cabaret des Oiseaux. With Prince Tesso Sisowath and Princess Vichara Norodom she helped restore the Ballet Classique Khmer de Paris (BCK). From November 2015 to January 2016 she taught dance at Centre Khemara in Montreal. For that short course she taught 17 Chha Banchos movements as a base for students, and she chose excerpts of Khmer classical music from the University of Fine Arts in Phnom Penh for practice.

In 2016 Princess Norodom Buppha Devi and Prince Sisowath Tesso invited her to settle again in Cambodia and help pass on the heritage of classical dance. She became an artistic director at the Center of Cambodian Living Arts (ECLA) with director Jean-Baptiste Phou. Since then she has divided her time between France, her home base, and Cambodia. In 2020 she went to France and could not return to Cambodia because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Legacy

She sees it as her duty to pass her knowledge of the Apsara dance to the next generation. She has documented the kbach, the movements of the classical repertoire. She says there were once 4,500 kbach and that only 1,000 have survived. She has been called "the last Apsara of Cambodia."

She appears in La beauté du geste (Tep Hattha in Khmer), Xavier de Lauzanne's documentary on the Royal Ballet, which was shown at the 12th Cambodia International Film Festival in 2023.

Works

• Cambodian classical dance (Tradition)
• Robam Tep Apsara (Tradition)

See also

• Royal Ballet of Cambodia
• Norodom Buppha Devi
• Cambodian Living Arts
• All creators

References