Creator

Sophiline Cheam Shapiro

Cambodian classical dancer and choreographer who makes new works in the classical form and co-founded the Khmer Arts Academy in Long Beach.

A close view of a dancer's hands and wrists, fingers curved back in the classical gesture, wearing gold bracelets and rings, with silk costume cloth in deep indigo and gold
Illustration of the hands of a Khmer classical dancer in a gold-and-indigo silk costume. It shows no real dancer or performance.

Sophiline Cheam Shapiro is a Cambodian classical dancer, teacher and choreographer.[1] She was among the first dancers to graduate from the School of Fine Arts in Phnom Penh after the fall of the Khmer Rouge, and her dances bring new subjects and stories into the classical form.[2][3] In 2002 she co-founded the Khmer Arts Academy in Long Beach, California, and she is artistic director of the Sophiline Arts Ensemble, the company that grew out of it.[1][4] In 2009 the National Endowment for the Arts gave her a National Heritage Fellowship.[1]

Early life and training

Shapiro was born in Phnom Penh.[2] She was a child during the Khmer Rouge years, and in 1997 she wrote about the songs the regime taught children in her essay "Songs My Enemies Taught Me", published in Children of Cambodia's Killing Fields (Yale University Press).[3][1]

After 1979 surviving classical artists came together in small groups to revive their art. In one of these, in Kompong Thom, she first learned to dance at the age of twelve, studying with Soth Sam On, a former dance master of the royal palace. Two years later she followed him to the newly reopened School of Fine Arts in Phnom Penh, and she was in its first graduating class.[5][2] She learned all three major female roles, the neang, the nearong and the yeak, which Northrop calls rare. From 1988 to 1991 she taught on the school's dance faculty and toured India, the Soviet Union, the United States and Vietnam with its ensemble.[2][1]

Teaching in California

In 1991 she married the American John Shapiro and moved to Los Angeles.[3] She studied dance ethnology at the University of California, Los Angeles, at undergraduate and graduate levels.[2] Soon after arriving she began giving workshops in classical dance and music across Southern California for young people in the Cambodian refugee community.[1][5] She has said that classical dance shows "the graceful, refined, beautiful side" of being Cambodian, something the community can practice and take pride in.[5]

In 2002 she and her husband founded the Khmer Arts Academy in Long Beach to teach traditional Cambodian art and culture to a new generation of Cambodian Americans.[1][3] Among her students there was the dancer and choreographer Prumsodun Ok.[6]

Choreography

Her first full-length work, Samritechak (2000), retells Shakespeare's Othello as a classical Cambodian dance; it premiered in Phnom Penh.[3][1] Later works include The Glass Box (2002), Seasons of Migration (2005), Pamina Devi: A Cambodian Magic Flute (2006), Spiral XI (2008), Shir-Ha-Shirim (2008), made with the composer John Zorn, and The Lives of Giants (2010).[2] Her dances have toured to three continents, to venues including New York's Joyce Theater, Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, the Venice Biennale and the Hong Kong Arts Festival.[2]

In 2012 John Shapiro, the ensemble's executive director, told culture360 that most Cambodian troupes performed the same small set of dances, many of them made in the 1950s and 1960s. In his view she was the first classical choreographer, and nearly the only one, to make dances that answer to the present day.[4] The ensemble then had its own theater in Takhmao, about 11 kilometers from central Phnom Penh.[4]

In April 2013 the ensemble opened the dance program of the Season of Cambodia festival at the Joyce Theater with her A Bend in the River, with music by Him Sophy and puppets by the sculptor Sopheap Pich.[7]

Honors

  • 2006: Nikkei Asia Prize for Culture.[2]
  • 2009: National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.[1][2]
  • She has also held Creative Capital, Durfee, Guggenheim and Irvine dance fellowships and a United States Artists fellowship.[2][1]

References 7
  1. ↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 National Endowment for the Arts, Sophiline Cheam Shapiro, 2009 National Heritage Fellow (2009)
  2. ↑ 2.00 2.01 2.02 2.03 2.04 2.05 2.06 2.07 2.08 2.09 Northrop, University of Minnesota, Sophiline Cheam Shapiro (2013)
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 PBS Frontline World, Sophiline Shapiro: The Dancer (2002)
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 ASEF culture360, At home and abroad: The Khmer Arts Ensemble (March 13, 2012)
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 Alliance for California Traditional Arts, Sophiline Cheam Shapiro (undated)
  6. ↑ VOA, Manilene Ek, Ambitious Cambodian Dance Troupe Honors Artistic Traditions in New Ways (June 29, 2017)
  7. ↑ American Theatre, News in Brief for April 2013 (April 1, 2013)
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This page was last edited on 27 October 2026, at 14:55.