Cambodian dance speaks volumes about survival

Susan Walker DANCE WRITER

Given that artists and intellectuals are the first to go whenever despots take over a nation, how does a culture survive after the massacre of its people?
This question must have been on Peter Chin's mind when he began the research in Cambodia that fed the creation of his moving and thought-provoking work, Transmission of the Invisible.
A most mature and fully integrated multimedia production, the show begins in darkness and profound silence, suggestive of the silencing of between 1 million and 2 million Cambodians murdered by the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979.
Phon Sopheap and Yim Savann, born in Cambodia in the years after the fall of Pol Pot's brutal regime, begin to dance surrounded by the sounds of a rural village awakening to birdsong. They seem to be telling a story from their pliéed stance, with supple, sweeping arms, delicate hand gestures and fingers pointing as if to say, "Listen."
As, one by one, Andrea Nann, Louis Laberge-Côte and Heidi Strauss enter the scene, Cylla von Tiedemann's video projection is a shimmer of green, like biological forms growing under a microscope. The dancers exchange gestures, springing to life, their movements increasing and spreading from one to the other like signals received and transmitted.
Garnet Willis's sound design creates an enveloping environment: inside a temple, or out on the street, or to some mysterious, sacred place in nature. Chin's music, played on flutes, horns and in an insistent drumming, is almost hypnotic.
A layering of imagery in sound, spoken word and video creates a montage effect. Words are cut off. Inside a ruin, debris falls from the ceiling. But life returns. Beautiful film footage of koi swimming in a stream and a night sky filled with the glow of millions of fireflies are juxtaposed with bustling street scenes. A child's hand cradles the brittle fingers of a dying relative. In such ways the idea of the transference of spirit is conveyed.
Dance is way of showing the imprint of a culture on a body, like a genetic code. As the three Toronto dancers interact with the two Cambodians, they move in strikingly individual ways, and then combine in gorgeous formations.
Chin has travelled far, geographically and metaphysically, to bring back a story of survival and renewal.
Transmission of the Invisible ends as it began, in deep silence, but the final silence is one in which to reflect all that we have seen, heard and felt.