Chheng Phon

Cambodian dramatist and educator who rebuilt the country's arts schools and performing arts repertoire after the Khmer Rouge period.

Creator details
Khmer name	ឆេង ផុន
Also known as	Chheng Pon
Roles	Educator; Tradition bearer; Author; Scholar
Based in	Cambodia
Recognition	Grand Prize of the Fukuoka Asian Cultural Prizes (https://fukuoka-prize.org/en/laureates/detail/66265767-0cd7-48f6-bd72-8e7608a63510)
Subjects	Dance & Theatre; Literature & Storytelling; History & Remembrance; Community & Civic Life

Chheng Phon (ឆេង ផុន) was a Cambodian dramatist, theater director and teacher who helped rebuild Cambodia's arts schools after the Khmer Rouge years. He was president of the Khmer Artists' Association and later served as Minister of Information and Culture. He received the Grand Prize of the Fukuoka Asian Cultural Prizes in 1997, and he died in 2016.

Early life and training

Chheng Phon was born in Kompong Cham Province. He worked his way through school and graduated from the Teacher's School of the Ministry of National Education. He then completed his studies in China.

In the late 1950s he was a 27-year-old clown studying dance at the Chan Chhaya pavilion of the Royal Palace, where he learned the dances of the Royal Ballet of Cambodia. He was a scholar as well as a comic actor and dancer, and he wanted to know classical dance in body and spirit as well as in the mind. Each day he trained beside eight-year-old girls and learned every role. Queen Kossamak encouraged him and told colleagues she had found a strong candidate for the expert professor of dance she hoped to develop.

Career

He became a professor at the Royal University of Fine Arts in Phnom Penh. In 1970 he led a Cambodian dance troupe to the Osaka International Exposition in Japan. He was president of the Khmer Artists' Association.

Chheng Phon led Cambodia's National Conservatory of Spectacles. There he worked to save Cambodian puppet theater by supporting performers and collecting musical scores, and he encouraged young people to take up the traditional performing arts. Cultural Survival and the Angkor Database date his time at the head of the conservatory to the 1960s.

In the 1970s he started a performing arts "farm" outside Phnom Penh. There students from the University of Fine Arts trained in traditional dance drama while they raised vegetables, chickens and pigs.

The Khmer Rouge years

The Fukuoka Prize citation says that during Democratic Kampuchea (1975 to 1979) he was sent to forced labor on a collective farm in Kompong Thom Province. In Cultural Survival's account he was a marked man who lived deep in the forest in the north, tending water buffalo, while Khmer Rouge teams searched for him. In a 1989 interview he said: "I am a writer, and yet I cannot find words to describe the Pol Pot regime." He also said that only 300 scholars were still alive in Cambodia when he returned in 1979, and that fewer than 10 teachers of apsara dance were still living, all in their sixties and seventies.

Rebuilding the arts

After the fall of the Khmer Rouge, Chheng Phon recruited musicians, dancers and shadow players who had survived the Pol Pot years to give training in the traditional arts. He founded a school of fine arts for children orphaned in the conflict. A Cultural Survival article dates the reopening of the University of Fine Arts under his direction to January 1981. He went on recruiting dancers after many artists had left their professions. In May 1989 he met the former dancer Roeung Savath at a market and persuaded her to come back to the troupe.

He became minister of information and culture after the fall of the Khmer Rouge, in 1981 in one Cultural Survival article and about 1982 in another. Cultural Survival writes that he at times worked around directives from Vietnamese "experts" and from the government Hanoi had set up, and that his priority was to rebuild the culture to help heal the country. Once a month he came to the University of Fine Arts to give half-day lectures, colloquia and classes on nationalism, socialism, artistic ideals and art in general, often holding up Angkor Wat as the model of Khmer tradition.

The Fukuoka Prize citation dates his reopening of the University of Fine Arts in Phnom Penh, the former Royal University of Fine Arts, to 1989, with the aim of preserving Cambodia's tangible and intangible heritage. He reopened its archaeology and architecture departments to train young specialists to preserve and restore the Angkor monuments. The same year he told the classical ballet to revive all 18 of its forms. In December 1989, as Minister of Information and Culture, he said Cambodia was trying to preserve all its monuments and had asked the world for help restoring them.

Later life

After he withdrew from most political work in 1992, he used his own money to set up the Center for Culture and Vipassana at his home on the edge of Phnom Penh. There he worked to revive Khmer virtue and spirit and to heal troubled minds through meditation.

A shadow-play and traditional dance troupe he led performed in New York in 1993; the Fukuoka Prize citation says the performance won high acclaim for celebrating the rebirth of Cambodia.

He later chaired Cambodia's National Election Committee, which he told The Phnom Penh Post he joined after ten years away from political life. On March 7, 1998, he signed a $25.8 million contract with private companies, among them Ciccone Calcografica, to stage the elections. In Human Rights Watch's 1998 report, the committee's chair and vice chair were generally perceived as neutral. The report adds that the committee's neutrality was called into question when he joined the two co-prime ministers in signing the contract, and that several opposition politicians called for his resignation.

He died on December 22, 2016, in Ta Khmau.

Views

At international meetings, including the Japan Foundation's Symposium on Angkor, he argued that cultural restoration in Cambodia is a spiritual restoration. He opposed a five-star hotel near the Angkor monuments. He proposed small guesthouses, horse-drawn carts as the only taxis, modern towns 50 km (31 mi) away, and warned that the vibrations of jet airplanes shake the monuments' foundations. He also proposed museums that keep culture in place among the people, and he said that the government tried to preserve the culture of every ethnic minority, even one of only 30 families.

Works and recognition

Chheng Phon produced and performed original plays based on folktales and village dances handed down by oral tradition. The Fukuoka Prize credits his published works, performances and dialogues with helping Cambodians rediscover Khmer values. He received the Grand Prize of the Fukuoka Asian Cultural Prizes in 1997, at the eighth presentation of the prizes.

Works

• Cambodian classical dance (Tradition)
• Pailin peacock dance (Tradition)
• Trot (Tradition)

See also

• Royal Ballet of Cambodia
• Cambodian classical dance
• All creators

References