CAMBODIAN ANGST OVER WEEPING ELEPHANTS AND QUASI-EROTIC TOPLESS CELESTIAL DANCERS
January 3rd 2009 09:59
Cambodian monks persuaded the kingdom’s authorities to ban the country's first rock opera, which features actors dressed as clergy who break into song and dance, saying it insults Buddhism, according to an AFP report.
The Supreme Sangha Council of Buddhist Monks also demanded an apology from the show's director, writer and actors.
Where Elephants Weep, a modern take on a traditional Cambodian love story, merges pop and rock music with more traditional and historical Cambodian tunes
It played in Phnom Penh from late November until early December.
The show was aired by a local television station in the last week of December, prompting the monks' council to write to complain.
The council objected to many scenes, including one in which the actor "left the monkhood and slept with a woman, but a moment later (he) put the robe back on to be a monk again..."
The letter said the show "oppresses Cambodian Buddhist monks, causes more than 50,000 monks to loss their honour, value and to express frustration."
Religions minister Min Khin stepped in and the television station was ordered not to go ahead with a second broadcast planned for New Year's Day.
The show had a successful US preview last year and, after its run ends in Cambodia, it is expected to tour South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan before returning to the US.
Phnom Penh-based blogger Andy Brouwer reported on New Years Eve that “the conservative nature of Cambodia shone through again with the decision to postpone tonight's second showing of the Where Elephants Weep rock-opera on the CTN channel after the Ministry of Information ordered the station not to air the program…. They don't seem to grasp that it's make-believe (though a musical rock-opera is something new for them to comprehend I grant you) and that considerably more damage has been done to the general perception of monks in Cambodia by a series of violent attacks and a rape in recent months by members of their order.
Fat chance of that because the website is based in the US where the Cambodian government has no jurisdiction.
The controversy simmered for a few days over the paintings, which had a cheesy Playboy-Vargas quasi-erotic element to them.
Several deeply offended academics jumped into print condemning the paintings, but Chuch Phoeung, Cambodia's secretary of state of the ministry of Culture and Fine Arts wasn’t so fussed.
He indicated that his ministry has no reaction to these images, and said, “This is the freedom of the artist who drew the human body. If you visit European museums, you will see these types of drawings in the majority of museums.”
An Australian academic then elevated the controversy to the height of absurdity in a letter to the Phnom Penh Post on January 2. The academic, Dr Peg Levine of Monash University in Melbourne wrote a long tirade which included a plug for a forthcoming book. She accused artis Reahu of committing “ritualcide” (her term as she proudly claims) and indulging in “born again defiance.”
She wrote, “”In some ways the quality of his (Reahu’s) defiance re-enacts the Khmer Rouge forceful justification for their means that broke down the ritual infrastructure of the nation, Cambodia.”
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