She moves with the grace of a woman 20 years younger. She has a sharp and mischievous wit. She is warm and generous, and self-possessed. She says what she thinks and she knows what she wants. When she smiles, her teeth flash. If she’s teaching you, you’d better show results. Although she looks like an auntie, she’s still a prima donna and her students are in awe of her. She is teaching them Khmer classical dance in a bare room on the ground floor of one of the outer buildings of Sisowath High School. The students are of all ages, some of them from the ‘Children of Bassac’ group. She teaches both male and female roles. She can be an apsara or an ogre.

 

45 years ago, Voan Savay was the star Apsara dancer after Princess Buppha Devi. On March 18th 1970, General Lon Nol and Prince Sirik Matak staged a coup d’état against Sihanouk while he was in Paris, and declared a new Khmer Republic under the leadership of Lon Nol. Civil war broke out. In 1971, Voan Savay went on tour with the Royal Ballet troupe to the USA. In Washington, Camera Three made a documentary about ‘the last embodiment of classical dance in Cambodia in one of their last performances.’ The narrator stated that the Royal Ballet had been ‘systematically destroyed by successive governments in the last decade, and the very existence of this art was threatened.’ Now, he continued, it was finished and the surviving dancers were dispersed, living in exile all over the world. ‘This performance and demonstration were held for Camera Three just as the end neared’. Voan Savay performed the Apsara dance and was interviewed by the famous and rather flamboyant Kabuki specialist, Faubion Bowers. She told him she was 18 years old. In fact she was 20, but she decided to lie about her age to create the impression she desired.

 

Camera Three’s portents of doom were premature. In 1974, I saw Savay performing the Apsara Dance in the National Theatre of Phnom Penh, together with a troupe of ‘exiled’ dancers, and I took two photos of her on stage.

 

In April 1975 the Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh and Savay left the city with the rest of the population. She worked in the countryside for the duration of the regime. She kept her mouth shut, did what she was told, and was determined to survive. She told no-one that she was a dancer, and once when recognized as such, she convinced the cadres that she had danced, yes, but only at festivals in village temples.

 

When Vietnam invaded Cambodia in 1979, she went back to Phnom Penh. She decided it was time to get married, so she did. She married another dancer, a Lakhon Khol performer. After a year they decided to leave Cambodia, with the intention of going to a third country, so they made their way to Nong Chan, on the Thai border. Nong Chan was one of the ‘border hamlets’, a crossing point for refugees heading for one of the camps inside Thailand. It was controlled by the KPNLF (Khmer People’s National Liberation Front). Savay saw so many children there, and she decided she had to stay and teach them to dance. She was offered support to work for social activities, and for the next few years she moved around the border area organizing dance classes in Site 1, Site B under the Sihanoukist FUNCINPEC and Site 8 under the Khmer Rouge. Whatever their political affiliations, it did not matter to Voan Savay. She was a dancer and a teacher, that was all. However, she could not bring herself to stay in Site 8, but arranged for dance students from there to come to her for instruction.

 

After the hamlets of Nong Chan and Nong Samet were attacked and destroyed by the Vietnamese in the mid-‘80s, the populations moved to Site 2 under the administration of UNBRO. It became a refugee city of 145,000 inhabitants rising to a maximum of 192,000, and this was where Savay set up her Dance School, in the Cultural Centre. The dancers she taught were superb, and they also had their own musicians. They performed all over Thailand many times.

 

In 1991, after almost ten years in the camps, Savay took a group of 53 artists, including dancers, musicians and costumiers, to tour the United States for 3 months. Later that year she finally returned to Cambodia and set up an artists’ village outside Phnom Penh. Soon she and her troupe were invited to join the Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts, and were absorbed by the Ministry. In 1997, she was touring in France at the time of the coup d’état, and she decided to remain there. In 2006, Prince Tesso Sisowath asked her to produce a dance performance of the Reamker, which she did successfully with the participation of the Cabaret des Oiseaux and Selepak Khmer. She also helped to recreate the Ballet Classique Khmer in Paris.

 

Since then she had been invited to give dance classes in Canada and the USA, and had been visiting Cambodia regularly. However, she was not in Cambodia when she was identified as the dancer in my Apsara photos by Sophiline Cheam Shapiro, so I could not meet her.

 

While in Siem Reap on 23rd July this year for a Cambodian Living Arts music performance, I met Phou Jean-Baptiste, the CLA Country Manager. He had recently come from Paris, and my wife noticed from the way he moved that he was probably a dancer, so I asked him if he knew Voan Savay. He said he did, that he was studying with her, and that she was in Cambodia at the moment, teaching dance classes at the Sisowath High School every Sunday. This was a pleasant surprise because she was the only living dancer in the photos that I had not met. I knew her history from my contact with Lucie Leng in Paris, but I had been waiting more than a year to actually meet her in person, and none of the other dancers had thought of informing me she was here!

 

Watching Voan Savay teach is a fascinating experience. Despite her age, she still has perfect balance and control, and she teaches dance like a kung-fu master, no nonsense and a stick. I was immediately very impressed. She teaches all day, and she never looks really tired. “I am 67, and my body is getting old”, she said to me in French. “But I have to continue to teach as much and as many as I can, while I have this energy.” She gave me the Savay look, which is straight in the eye. “Je suis pressé (I am in a hurry)”, she said emphatically. Her sense of urgency is palpable and ever-present. There is also a touch of desperation. She accepts anyone who shows the ability and the dedication to dance. Money doesn’t come into it. But she feels that some dance teachers are only interested in teaching those who can pay. There is too much self-interest, too much ego in the dance world.

 

She comes to Battambang to give a talk and demonstration at the opening of my exhibition on dancers. The idea is to give a one-day crash course to two dancers from the Phare Ponleu Selapak dance group in the disciplines of the classical dance as performed 100 years ago, before the refinements introduced by Queen Kossomak in the ‘50s. To help her, she brings Sok Nalys, a principal dancer specializing in the older tradition. When Nalys dances, the contrast is astonishing. Arm movements are wider, sweeping, the body movements more vertical, with much more bending of the knees, and sharply angled wrist and fingers, and you realize these are the stances we see in stone on the bas-reliefs of Angkor Wat, the apsaras who float above the sea of milk. Ironically, the actual Apsara Dance created by Queen Kossomak for Buppha Devi has ironed out these movements into something more elegant but at the same time earthbound.

 

The Phare dancers arrive in full ‘ancient’ costume, white-faced and ready to dance. But Savay will have none of this. They are not dressed well enough, and must be resewn into their garments before they can perform. It is hot in the improvised dressing room, and the audience are already waiting, but that just can’t be helped. There are no short cuts for Voan Savay. All is done the way it must be done, and when they finally get to dance, they dance well, but not quite well enough.

So Nalys dances, first in the ‘modern’ style, then in the ‘ancient’. In her second performance, halfway through the dance the recorded music abruptly fails, but Nalys does not miss a beat. She continues the flowing, almost bouncing movements in silence as the audience hold their breath, and then begins to sing the melody herself. Savay and the Phare dancers backstage quickly pick up the melody and bring the dance smoothly to its conclusion.

 

Savay seems pleased. Back in the hotel lobby she and Nalys click into a discussion on correct technique, bending their wrists and fingers into almost impossible positions, oblivious to the curiosity of the hotel staff, who do not know they are in the presence of a real Apsara.

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