Temporalities of Belonging, Architectures of Tradition
Organizer(s): Bradley DeMatteo (University of Toronto,)
Chair(s): Bradley DeMatteo (University of Toronto), Allan Zheng (University of California Riverside)
From four intersecting perspectives on contemporary Cambodian and Cambodian American performance practices, this panel examines moments in traditional performance when sound, music, and dance not only bind community but act as platforms for people to negotiate temporality as well as spatially construct senses of home. We ask, how do sounds create and embody ideas of community and home in ephemerality? Amidst histories of contemporary migrations, intergenerational trauma, and social changes, people create a space of their own through the production of familiar sounds or the performance of known gestures. These ephemeral, often repeated soundings allow people to exist in unfamiliar, changing, or unwelcoming environments. Sounded cultural practices such as classical and social dances, ceremonial music, and even traditional games ground people into the land they live on, generate comfort, pride, and belonging in both private and public spaces. Considering these initiatives to access and produce music and culturally meaningful sounds, we offer insights on individual and collective negotiations of social identity, racial inequities, and tactics to claim space and shape time. Through different situations, we look at how cultural and social identities––in our case, Cambodian––are sounded out through the way people musically inhabit spaces. In doing so, we bring innovative perspectives at the crossroad of ethnomusicology and sound studies on how notions of place and belonging are crafted and articulated through auditory experiences.
Presentations in the Session
Styling the Contemporary: Creative Self-Making in Cambodian Contemporary Performance
Allan Zheng
University of California Riverside
My presentation conceptualizes the contemporary as a nexus for creativity and self-making in the Cambodian performing arts. I place an emphasis on creative exploration in contemporary performance, a genre that is discouraged in Cambodia because of the broader focus on cultural preservation following the elimination of over 80% of artists and scholars during the genocide. Based on my ethnographic work from 2022 to 2023, contemporary performance is also a space for reimagining the Cambodian performing arts and conveying the emerging interests and values among a rising generation of Cambodian creatives. In this paper, I put into dialogue the works of one composer and one choreographer and unpack the intricate layers of sounds and movement to think through both the choreosonics of their works and the crossings of Cambodian classical and global styles. I argue that their hybrid, postmodern performance vocabularies are indicative of processes of glocalization that recontextualizes techniques and styles from across the world into the Cambodian performing arts scene. Additionally, the technical collage of styles allow creatives to explore and negotiate issues of identity, economic struggle, and sense of belonging in the world while respecting their foundations in Cambodian classical music and dance. Furthermore, while hybrid works are contentious for their borrowing of various cultural genres and styles, I suggest that these projects situate themselves in a dialogue about the role of global cultural flows in understanding the contemporary human as interconnected within an ever-expanding contact zone.
Roam Vong: Cambodian American Dance
Sophea Seng
California State University Long Beach
This presentation examines the popular dance called roam vong, or dancing in community. While roam vong is not normally regarded as ballroom dance, the Khmer roam vong is a staple among Cambodians and Cambodian Americans at celebrations, and increasingly in daily life for dance troupes. Like ballroom dance in various Asian diasporic communities, roam vong draws attention to the transpacific flows of colonialism, imperialism, and resettlement of Asian bodies throughout the globe. In this ethnographic project, I examine the process of becoming part of the Cambodian diaspora–a constellation of unstable and shifting identities, through roam vong, a space and practice that allows one to perform Khmerness within the larger movements for social justice, community building, and cultural revitalization.
Court Music: Music, Sound, and Voice in a Cambodian American Park
Bradley DeMatteo
University of Toronto
Pailin Park is an epicenter of Cambodian sociality in Lowell, Massachusetts. From volleyball tournaments, afternoon chess matches, to Buddhist blessings during Khmer New Year, Pailin Park functions as a distinctly Cambodian space in an American city. In this paper, I explore how this occurs in part through sound, music, and especially voice as features of sonic architecture––sounds that serve as an active structural feature of space-making (Karapostoli and Votsi 2019). Sound in Pailin Park spans multilingual speech, shouting, laughter, the percussive clacks and thumps of gameplay, Cambodian rock n’ roll songs from the 1960s playing from portable speakers, and, at times, silence. On nearly any warm afternoon and evening, this breadth of sonic practice is most lively when people come to play volleyball, chess, boules, and sey, kicked shuttlecock. While producing voice and sound is not a primary goal of these activities, it contributes significantly to the way that Cambodians and Cambodian Americans in Lowell both claim and shape public space. I consider the ways that the soundscapes of gameplay and gathering during typical evenings at Pailin Park contribute to sonic architectures of space in a physical sense as well as in the making of home through experiences of multigenerational refugee un- and resettlements.
Work cited:
Karapostoli, Aimilia, and Nefta-Eleftheria Votsi. 2018. “Urban Soundscapes in the Historic Centre of Thessaloniki: Sonic Architecture and Sonic Identity.” Sound Studies (2015) 4 (2): 162–77.
|
