Dancer in the Dressing Room - Om Yuvanna
I could easily have missed it completely. It was not a glossy professional job, and it was quite small. It was in among various other leaflets, magazines and information scattered on a ledge by the window of the Cambodian restaurant in Machida, a suburb of Tokyo, Japan. I only went to that restaurant about twice a month, and if I had gone there a few days later the flyer would probably have disappeared.
It caught my eye because I recognised something very familiar about it. The picture at the top was a poor quality black-and-white print, about postage stamp size, but it was, on close inspection, a picture I had taken myself 32 years before, of a dancer in a dressing room in Cambodia.
I had taken the photo at one of the rare performances of Khmer classical dance in the National Theatre of Phnom Penh in 1974. It was the first and only performance that I saw during two years in Cambodia. At that time the Royal Ballet hardly ever performed in public, since public spaces were deemed hazardous. It was wartime, and even the dance practice in the Royal Palace had been cancelled after rockets landed nearby.
I was one of two foreigners present. I shot one film, 20 exposures, without flash or tripod. I wandered into the dressing room backstage and took a few photos of some dancers preparing for the performance. Nobody seemed to notice me. They were too busy. After that I shot the rest of the film in the auditorium, resting the camera on anything at hand, or backed up against the wall to the right side of the stage. About half the pictures came out reasonably well.
My first reaction - I was furious! Someone had stolen my photo! It appeared to be credited to one “Dena Langlois”!* The text was all in Japanese so I could not decipher it sufficiently. I took the flyer home, and my wife called the number on it. The woman who answered was a Japanese dancer, Hitomi Yamanaka, whom I had actually met briefly at a UNESCO gathering. She had been studying Khmer classical dance for some years, and the woman in the photo was her teacher. Hitomi had brought her to Japan to give a performance in Angyohji, a small Buddhist temple not far from our house. The dancer’s name was Om Yuvanna.
I went to see the performance a few days later. I did not meet Yuvanna beforehand. I wanted to see her dance first. When she appeared on stage, Yuvanna’s elegance and the beauty of her movement captivated me entirely. It brought tears to my eyes. After the dance, through an interpreter, she told her story.
After the fall of Phnom Penh she had been forced to leave the city like everyone else, and had spent the next few years working in the fields and building dikes and dams in the Battambang area. She suffered a serious fall and injured her leg, and there was no proper treatment. She lost all her photos and documents. After the arrival of the Vietnamese army and the liberation from the Khmer Rouge, she went with her sister to Siem Reap where they worked in the Grand Hotel. There, she and her sister presented their first impromptu post-Pol Pot dance performance before an audience of Vietnamese soldiers who were billeted there. There was no music, so they sang themselves. Soon after, she returned to Phnom Penh and joined the few other dancers who had survived, in trying to resurrect the dance. Miraculously, she was still able to dance, although her injury gave her pain.
After Yuvanna had related her story, I finally greeted her with due reverence and gave her several more prints of photos from the National Theatre performance in which she had appeared, both from the dressing room and on stage. The dance was the Apsara Dance.
So how had she found this particular picture? Apparently, around 1987, someone in Paris had given it to Professor Pich Tum Kravel, Under Secretary of State for the Performing Arts, Fine Arts and Libraries, who had recognized it was Yuvanna and passed it on to her. But the source remains a mystery. One possibility… there was a Frenchman, a lycée professor I think, who also took photographs at the National Theatre. I remember he had a big camera, a 6x6, perhaps a Rolleiflex twin lens reflex, or something like that, and a tripod….but for some reason most of his pictures didn’t come out. I can’t be sure, but I may have given him some prints of my more successful efforts. But I only met him a few times, and I don’t remember his name.
*Note: The credit on the flyer for Ms. Dana Langlois, owner of Java Café in Phnom Penh, was in fact for the other photo, which she had taken of Yuvanna’s student, Hitomi Yamanaka.