Dancing as the bombs fell: Exhibit shows slice of life before city’s fall
Fri, 1 April 2016
Audrey Wilson
Ten years ago, in Tokyo, photographer Colin Grafton stepped inside a Cambodian restaurant and was handed a flyer for a Khmer classical dance performance that evening, featuring veteran Om Yuvanna.

He immediately recognised the image on top. He had taken it in 1973. In the black-and-white photo, a young Yuvanna checks herself in the dressing-room mirror before a show at Phnom Penh’s National Theatre. The performance was rare: one of the few to take place in the capital in the midst of civil war.



In an interview this week at the Bophana Center, where a collection of his photographs titled Dancers 1973 goes on exhibition tonight, the semi-retired Grafton remembered the hazy details of the event with a hint of nostalgia.

“The National Theatre was usually closed because of bomb scares,” he said. “I can’t remember how I found out about it. I’m sure I didn’t buy a ticket.”

Grafton headed to the dressing room before the event began. Backstage, he captured a striking black-and-white record of the dancers’ pre-stage routine: a flurry of last-minute preparations and glimmering apsara crowns. Outside, the auditorium was nearly at capacity. Grafton and a French photographer were the only two foreigners present.



In the capital in 1973, film was scarce. “Every shot counted,” Grafton said. A few of the pictures are fuzzy, but his fared better than the other photographer’s images, which didn’t have enough light. Grafton recalls lending him some prints afterward.

In some of the images, masters Soth Sam On, who appears in many of the era’s feature films, and Neang Kem Bunnak move across the stage with grace. Others are captured on the film, as well: Yuvanna, as a backup dancer, and Menh Kossony, who later worked as a dance teacher and is currently a secretary of state at the Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts.

In 1973, Kossony danced in the buong suong, a prayer for rain – and for peace. She hadn’t seen the full set of photos until last year. “I didn’t notice Mr Colin,” she said via telephone this week. “But I am so thankful that he kept the photos of us – after the war, we never had our own.”



A teacher by trade, Colin Grafton had travelled to Phnom Penh in 1972 to design a curriculum for an English-language centre. Some of Grafton’s other photos on display were taken in 1974, a set of shop prints of his friend and colleague Prum Sisaphantha.

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