Pamela Tatge is the Director of the Wesleyan Center for the Arts, the theater that served as the opening venue for Dance, the Spirit of Cambodia. For more information on Cambodia and the Cambodian dance troupe, visit the Dance, the Spirit of Cambodia website.

How did you initially become involved in this project?

I think first it had to do with the New England Foundation for the Arts. The Director, Sam Miller, went to Wesleyan. When I started this job two years ago I asked that he keep us on his radar screen for special projects. When he knew there was a need to mount this production somewhere, he thought of Wesleyan because we have such a history of welcoming performers, particularly people from Asia. We have a very strong ethnomusicology PhD program here; we have faculty from India and Java. He also thought of us because one of the major consultants on the project is Sam-Ang Sam, who got his PhD at Wesleyan. I think the college setting is perfect because we can provide dormitories, meeting spaces, and the theater and we’re not commercially driven. It’s really an ideal place to host them and we are really honored to be the first hosts.

What has the interest been in the Cambodian troupe from the Wesleyan community?

It’s been absolutely wonderful. I think my only disappointment is that we don’t have our student body here. The faculty in music and dance were thrilled and they’ve been here watching rehearsals throughout the week. In fact our professors of Javanese music and dance did a jam session with the Cambodian musicians that was really fantastic. It was a wonderful cultural exchange that we hadn’t even planned.

The other interesting element about Wesleyan is that we employ several Cambodians on our staff. When I knew we were going to host the troupe during the summer, I put together a host committee of Cambodians in the state. I knew that there was already a Cambodian dance company in the state and it was vital to have that company involved. Somaly Hay and Dancers is the name of that company and Somaly became our chair. Working with the Institute for Community Research in Hartford, which has access to a lot of Cambodian artists and scholars in the state, we put together a host committee to spread the word and make sure that this company felt welcomed by their community when they arrived.

Is there a big Cambodian community in Connecticut?

Yes. It’s not as concentrated as the community in Lowell, MA, or Long Beach, CA but we do have concentrations in Danbury, Bridgeport, Bristol, and Hartford. That this state-wide committee came together is quite extraordinary. Their power in terms of spreading the word was evident by the fact that we were sold out on Tuesday for a Saturday performance. The potluck dinner that they had last week as a welcoming dinner was like a wedding. It was reuniting of people who knew each other. The younger generation of dancers who have never been to this country met Cambodians who have been living in this country for many years and found out what they were like. I sat next to a woman whose father was a general and whose father and mother were killed. She was one of two children out of eight who survived. For her this was an amazing reconnection to her cultural heritage and past. That we could do it in an informal setting-- that we didn’t just bring them in for the performance, but that there was a chance to talk-- was really a spectacular way to welcome these jetlagged people to this country.

So this was meaningful not just for Wesleyan but also for Cambodians in Connecticut.

Yes, and I think for us to make it meaningful for the Cambodian community is also to make it meaningful for Wesleyan. Our mission is to make Wesleyan a cultural resource in the state for all ethnicities. This was certainly a group who had never been through our doors before.

The scope of the project is so huge. What goes into bringing a group of forty people here from Cambodia?

It takes incredible managers. Deirdre Valente, who is the Vice President of Lisa Booth Management, is extremely organized. We needed to find dormitory space with kitchen facilities because the performers really needed to cook their own food. We had to make sure we had adequate rehearsal space and that we had the kind of technical staff that could work intensely over the course of five days to mount this production as efficiently and diplomatically as possible because what we’re doing is introducing western tempo and technologies to a group that isn’t used to that. We needed a team of very sensitive people to work with the design team and the producers to really make this week go well. A lot of careful thought went into it and a lot of back and forth with Deirdre that made it work.

From what I understand the last time a Cambodian dance troupe came to the U.S. was ten years ago. The political situation in Cambodia has changed dramatically in the past decade so this performance will really be the first of its kind in the U.S.

That’s true. I think what we have this time that we didn’t have ten years ago is all of this contextualization. Now we have all of these materials that really can prep our audiences and the press and have them understand the depth of this performance drama.




AsiaSource interview conducted by Michelle Caswell.