The dancer Chumvan Sodhachivy in “Bangsokol: A Requiem for Cambodia,” written by Him Sophy and directed by Rithy Panh, both survivors of the Khmer Rouge’s genocidal regime. The work’s New York premiere is Friday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.CreditZan Wimberly

Genocide Survivors Compose a Requiem for Cambodia

New York Times | 13 December 2017

The stage design of “Bangsokol” includes a three-panel screen on which scenes from the Khmer Rouge era are projected.CreditTey Tat Keng

Rithy Panh, a survivor of the Cambodian genocide under the Khmer Rouge, takes issue with the philosopher Theodor Adorno’s famous claim that to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.

“Personally, I don’t agree,” said Mr. Panh, the director of “Bangsokol: A Requiem for Cambodia,” which has its American premiere on Friday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. “We need creativity. We need more poetry after Auschwitz.”

Mr. Panh and Him Sophy, the composer of the new work, see art as a necessary part of healing from a tragedy on the scale of the Cambodian genocide by the Khmer Rouge. It left nearly 2 million dead between 1975 and 1979 and threatened to erase much of the country’s cultural heritage. Among the dead were an estimated 90 percent of Cambodia’s classical dancers.

The two men lost siblings and parents, and were forced to work, having eaten as little as 18 kernels of corn. “Our bodies need food,” Mr. Him said, “but so do our minds. Art is that food.”

Him Savy, one of the soloists who perform smot chants in “Bangsokol,” which recalls the Cambodian genocide.CreditZan Wimberly

Cambodia’s past is at the heart of both men’s work. Mr. Panh received a Golden Globe nomination this week for “First They Killed My Father,” which he produced with Angelina Jolie and which is based on Loung Ung’s memoir of the Khmer Rouge. Mr. Him wrote the opera “Where Elephants Weep,” a romance set against the regime’s terror, and in 2013 founded the Him Sophy School of Music in Phnom Penh.

“Bangsokol” is their first collaboration, and it’s also one of the first symphonic works to reckon with the Khmer Rouge era. (They worked with the American scholar Trent Walker, a specialist in Southeast Asian Buddhism, who wrote the libretto.) The title refers to Cambodian Buddhist funeral rites, in which a white cloth is placed over a dead body and slowly removed by a monk to signify transmigration into the next life.

The requiem, which is performed with a mixture of Western and traditional Cambodian instruments and incorporates the melodic chanting known as smot, unfolds over three movements. At the end of the first, a mournful lullaby gives way to brutal sounds and scenes from the genocide:

In the silence of the forest
With none to trust you’ll be alone
With wild beasts who grunt and groan
There you’ll be thrown away, too

Behind the performers onstage are three large screens with projections of period imagery: bombs, faces of refugees, even a clip of President Nixon saying, “Cambodia is the Nixon Doctrine in its purest form.”

But the ending is far from bleak. In Mr. Panh’s staging, performers celebrate and teach two children traditional Cambodian dance, while the chorus sings, “May the pained be free from pain, may the fearful be free from fear, may the sorrowful be free from sorrow — so, too, for all breathing beings.”

The dancers, Mr. Panh said, are meant to evoke the young people of Cambodia, who “need to know their roots.” This is the latest of his efforts at that education. His Oscar-nominated documentary “The Missing Picture” incorporated Claymation to dramatize Khmer Rouge history. “First They Killed My Father” features an entirely Cambodian cast, including many children.

Ms. Jolie, who adopted her son Maddox from a Cambodian orphanage and has been involved in aid efforts there for more than 15 years, said in an interview that, before she made “First They Killed My Father” with Mr. Panh and Ms. Ung, “there had not been a film on this scale in the Cambodian language with a narrative that the country itself could agree on.”

“Coming to terms with the past is an important part of the country’s ability to move forward,” Ms. Jolie added. “The revival of arts is a powerful symbol of Cambodia’s ability to survive beyond the Khmer Rouge and to recover from their horrific legacy.”

In addition to children in Cambodia, “Bangsokol” was written for the country’s diaspora communities around the world. (After this week, the piece will tour elsewhere in the United States and to Paris before heading to Cambodia in 2019.) In New York, the Brooklyn Academy performances will include outreach efforts coordinated by a team including Chhaya Chhoum, the executive director of the nonprofit organization Mekong NYC.

The tenor Chhorn Sam Ath sings traditional chants and plays percussion at the end of the requiem.CreditZan Wimberly

“I see this as a community healing process,” said Ms. Chhoum, who was born in Cambodia in the late 1970s and moved to the Bronx when she was 7. When she and other Cambodians watched a recent rehearsal of “Bangsokol,” she said, the room was full of tears. The people around her “just wanted to sit still for one moment.”

“I can’t imagine the trauma that they had, and that haunts them,” Ms. Chhoum said, adding that the piece was a “roller coaster of emotions” that also “allowed you to connect to the people next to you.”

Many of the Cambodians in attendance at the Brooklyn Academy will be hearing some of their country’s traditional instruments, which were forbidden under Khmer Rouge rule, for the first time. Mr. Him has been working since the early 2000s to reconstruct them.

Like the instruments, traditional music was also banned, Mr. Panh said, along with foreign languages — Cambodia had been colonized by the French — and religious practice.

“Totalitarians always want to kill culture,” Mr. Panh added. “But imagine life without football, Faulkner or Bob Dylan. It’s not life.”