If you like watching acrobats, Cambodia is a good place to be.
In 1986, during Cambodia’s civil war, a French humanitarian working in the refugee camps at the border of Cambodia and Thailand started teaching drawing to the refugee children. This effort, named P.H.A.R.E: Patrimoine Humain et Artistique des Réfugiés et de leurs Enfants (Human and Artistic Heritage of the Refugees and their Children) has now grown into a school that teaches music, visual arts, and circus theater in addition to standard academics. It has been so successful that it now has a performance theater in Siem Reap for graduates of the school.
Each show that they do not only showcases their acrobatic skills and some traditional Khmer dancing, but tells an uplifting moral story based in Cambodia. The show we saw focused on the importance of rice in the Khmer culture. It included some wonderful stage effects, such as rice “raining down” from above, dancers making impromptu rhythm instruments for a dance by shaking bowls of rice, and actors slipping and sliding along the rice-filled stage.
The show was filled with juggling, acrobatics, and quite good acting, all done with no spoken word. It was fascinating to watch them set up each different acrobatic move. One of my (Marsha’s) favorites was two men creating a balance beam by resting a plank on their shoulders, and then a third young man doing jumps and flips from the plank, with the plank holders carefully positioning the plank in the right place to catch him.
Just barely managed to catch the acrobat at the top of his flip!
When we were in Battambang, we also visited the Phare school for a festival celebrating the arts. There we got to see younger students (high school age) attempting some of the same acrobatic moves we saw in the circus: three people balancing on each other’s shoulders; two young men tossing a third into the air to do flips and then creating a base for him to land on with their arms and wrists; wonderful acts of balancing on poles; and our personal favorite, having a young woman doing a handstand with her legs in a split position while balancing on a tall young man’s upstretched arms, and other young men throwing a lad head first up and over the woman, to be caught on the other side by 4 young men. (See video here). These young students certainly know the meaning of teamwork!
Enjoy a few more videos from the circus show in Siem Reap:
Green Edges 