ABSTRACT

Each morning, hundreds of children in Site 2 (a displaced persons camp for Cambodians) would gather in bamboo and thatch practice halls. To the accompaniment of xylophones, drums, and gongs, bodies moved in controlled grace, creating and exuding individual and collective beauty and strength in the midst of dust, danger, and despair. Inside those rehearsal huts, and on stages scattered about the camp, Khmer young people were recreating and reclaiming a cultural heritage, a way of moving, passed down by their teachers, but denied and violated by their surrounding reality and by their immediate past. 2 I aim in this essay to examine aspects of the relationship between war, displacement, and dance for the people of Cambodia, a country whose inhabitants often define themselves as both sufferers of endless war and as inheritors of a precious artistic legacy.