#Return of the monkey king film full

When the platoons of monkey warriors arrive, they scratch their backsides, wriggle about and sniff each other.

The result, which I saw performed in an open market square adjacent to the burned-out theatre, is an irrepressible, often naive riot of colour and tender-hearted good humour. To create Weyreap, Chanrath and his fellow masters spent five months in 2003, teaching the thousands of intricate hand gestures to a new generation of dancers, some of whom had never seen Kaol before. Perhaps it was the Monkey Dance that kept me alive.' 'About a month later, I was released from prison. All I could do was a pathetic suggestion of itching and scratching.' It was enough to send the guard into paroxysms of laughter, and he was kept alive - and well fed - for future performances. But I was so malnourished and thin that I couldn't even stand up. 'The soldier had no idea what that was, and so asked me to give a demonstration. When his guards asked him about his profession, he plumped for the honest approach: 'I told them I was a Monkey Dancer,' he says. But when the Khmer Rouge took over, he was thrown in jail and tortured he seemed destined for execution. One of the choreographers of the piece, Pum Bun Chanrath, was famous in the 1960s and early 70s for his depiction of the role of Hanuman, the mighty Monkey King. 'We tracked down forgotten masters and brought them to the city to make the piece.' 'We travelled to tiny villages, only accessible by boat,' says Fred Frumberg of Amrita. So, when it came to staging Weyreap's Battle - the first major Kaol production in more than 30 years - the challenges were huge. Even so, only a handful of the original companies were re-established, and these only on an ad hoc basis to perform for weddings and funerals. The library of thousands of gestures was pieced together, like fragments of shattered earthenware. It was a tradition that existed exclusively in the minds and muscles of the masters who practised it - and thus was almost entirely obliterated during the Pol Pot genocide.ДЄfter the regime fell, the government launched a nationwide radio campaign to unearth surviving masters of the Kaol. Before the rise of the Khmer Rouge, there were about 30 troupes performing Lakhaon Kaol, the intricate, masked, all-male sacred form that boasts 4,000 gestures in its movement vocabulary. One cultural sphere that suffered particularly badly was Cambodia's 1,000-year-old dance tradition. 'And of that amount, only about 10 have any decent level of education.' 'There are only about 100 writers in this country,' according to You Bo of the writer's union. Thirty years on, Cambodian culture has yet to recover. Even people wearing glasses risked summary execution, just for looking brainy. This included anyone with secondary or tertiary education. Nowhere were the policies applied more barbarously than to artists, writers and intellectuals, with an estimated 90% wiped out. An estimated 1.7 million people were killed and many millions more displaced to the countryside, as the dictator tried to implement his brutal brand of rural socialism. Under the murderous regime of Pol Pot, which lasted from 1975-79, Cambodia and its people came under one of the most ferocious and sustained attacks in history. Its traditional dance piece Weyreap's Battle, a collaboration with the Cambodian University of Fine Arts and an independent outfit called Amrita Performing Arts, comes to the Barbican in London this week.ДЇor Cambodians, the burned-out theatre is a symbol for the country's stubborn, beleaguered culture in general. We have no other place to go.'ДЇrom a western perspective, the fact that this establishment manages to function and create works that tour the world is astounding. 'Even though it has burned down, we still practise and do everything as before. 'Before it was destroyed, this theatre was the best in Asia,' says dancer Nup Samoeun, who has been with the company for 29 years. In fact, everything continues as it must have done when this was a full, working performance space. An army of set-builders stagger over boulders in the gutted auditorium, putting the finishing touches to magnificent gilded pagodas and royal carriages. Dancers lope around the rubble doing physical exercises, or swing gently in hammocks under the stage. Actors practise their roles on a stage that is now little more than a mound of scorched concrete, overgrown with palm trees. Despite the devastation, it's a hive of activity.

#Return of the monkey king film full

But it is only when you enter the building that you perceive the full extent of what's going on in this extraordinary theatre.