Pamina Devi to Make Its U.S. Premiere

Khmer Arts Academy, Takhmao
September 16, 2007

Sayon Reachny (Sam Sathya, center) and her devotees mourn the kidnapping of Pamina Devi. (Photo courtesy of Khmer Arts Academy.) Full Size

Cambodian-American choreographer Sophiline Cheam Shapiro will present the U.S. premiere of her original, concert-length classical dance drama Pamina Devi: a Cambodian Magic Flute, featuring Cambodia’s Khmer Arts Ensemble, at the Phillips Center of the University of Florida, Gainesville, on Thursday, September 27, as part of a five-city, five-week U.S. tour. In preparation for the upcoming tour, friends, family and supporters were invited to a special dress rehearsal at the Khmer Arts Academy in Takhmao.

Pamina Devi was commissioned by famed theater and opera director Peter Sellars for New Crowned Hope, a 2006 Viennese festival that celebrated the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth by asking choreographers, composers, filmmakers and visual artists to respond to the work the Austrian composer had created during the last year of his life. Sellars asked Shapiro to re-imagine the opera The Magic Flute.

In Pamina Devi, Shapiro turns one eye toward Mozart’s oper­atic exploration of enlight­ened change in the aftermath of the American and French Revolutions and another eye toward her own experience with ‘enlightened’ change and revolution, which came as the di­rect result of the cruelty and suffering in­flicted by Cambodia’s brutal Khmer Rouge regime (1975-79).

Working from within the conservative structures of classical Cambodian dance, Shapiro sets her piece in a mytho-poetic time and space and speaks through an elaborate vocabulary of re­fined gestures, bejew­eled garments and percussive music. But she also pushes the form through the use of unexpected for­mations, an expanded kinetic vocabulary, recon­ceived mu­sical ar­rangements and instrumentation, and innovations in costuming and settings.

The Khmer Arts Ensemble is a 31-member independent classical dance and music troupe that specializes in the original choreography of artistic director Shapiro, as well as rarely performed works from the classical canon. The Ensemble tours internationally and performs at its own breathtaking pavilion-style theater in Takhmao, Cambodia. Its performing artists were trained at Phnom Penh’s National School of Fine Arts (Cambodia’s official fine arts conservatory), the Royal University of Fine Arts and the Royal Palace.

Following its American premiere in Florida, Pamina Devi will tour to Memorial Hall at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (5 OCT); New York City’s Joyce Theater (9-14 OCT); the Power Center at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (20-21 OCT); and the Clarice Smith Center for the Performing Arts at the University of Maryland, College Park (25-26 OCT).