Cambodia Living Arts
Thanks to a couple of v kind gifts recently, I've been able to get a new camera. Been trying it out and last night was a v happy occasion, snapping away at a performance by Cambodia Living Arts - an NGO that works to preserve the culture and artistic heritage of Cambodia.
First, some blurb about its founder, Arn Chorn-Pond, and then the photos...
Arn was born into a family of artists from Cambodia’s second-largest city, Battambang, where his parents ran an opera-house. As a part of the targeting of artists and intellectuals, the Khmer Rouge soldiers separated his family in 1975 and he was sent to a children’s labor camp. There, he was taken under the tutelage of a traditional arts Master and learned to play the Cambodian hammered dulcimer, Khim. Unlike most of the other children in the camp, Arn escaped death by playing propaganda music for the Khmer Rouge generals during massive executions. He later fled his captors when Vietnamese troops invaded Cambodia in 1979 and he managed to reach a refugee camp in Thailand, where Peter Pond, a Lutheran minister and aid worker, befriended and later adopted him in 1980.
In the mid-1990’s, Arn returned to Cambodia on a mission to rebuild the legacy of his family’s involvement in Cambodian Opera and to find his music teacher from the time of the Khmer Rouge. On his trip, he “discovered” that other Master artists who had miraculously survived the war and the resulting genocide, were surviving in extremely difficult living conditions. The Cambodian Masters Performers Program, now Cambodian Living Arts, was born....
http://www.cambodianlivingarts.org/
First, some blurb about its founder, Arn Chorn-Pond, and then the photos...
Arn was born into a family of artists from Cambodia’s second-largest city, Battambang, where his parents ran an opera-house. As a part of the targeting of artists and intellectuals, the Khmer Rouge soldiers separated his family in 1975 and he was sent to a children’s labor camp. There, he was taken under the tutelage of a traditional arts Master and learned to play the Cambodian hammered dulcimer, Khim. Unlike most of the other children in the camp, Arn escaped death by playing propaganda music for the Khmer Rouge generals during massive executions. He later fled his captors when Vietnamese troops invaded Cambodia in 1979 and he managed to reach a refugee camp in Thailand, where Peter Pond, a Lutheran minister and aid worker, befriended and later adopted him in 1980.
In the mid-1990’s, Arn returned to Cambodia on a mission to rebuild the legacy of his family’s involvement in Cambodian Opera and to find his music teacher from the time of the Khmer Rouge. On his trip, he “discovered” that other Master artists who had miraculously survived the war and the resulting genocide, were surviving in extremely difficult living conditions. The Cambodian Masters Performers Program, now Cambodian Living Arts, was born....
http://www.cambodianlivingarts.org/
What a feast that was! Your photos are great. Nicki x
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