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Pamina Devi: A Cambodian Magic Flute

Choreography, traditional music arrangements,
and lyrics by Sophiline Cheam Shapiro
Performed by the Khmer Arts Ensemble
(Phnom Penh)
Saturday, October 20, 1 pm [FAMILY PERFORMANCE]
Saturday, October 20, 8 pm
Sunday, October 21, 2 pm
Power Center

The brilliant classicism of imperial Vienna meets the mythic-poetic splendor of ancient Angkor in Pamina Devi: A Cambodian Magic Flute, a contemporary re-imagining of Mozart's fantastical opera by Cambodian-American choreographer Sophiline Cheam Shapiro. Performed in the refined and elaborate movement language of the thousand-year-old Cambodian classical dance tradition and set to traditional musical motifs played out by a pin peat instrumental ensemble, 32 dancers, musicians, and singers take the stage to explore the themes of enlightened change and transformation that frame Mozart's masterpiece. Cultures meld as we follow Pamina's arduous journey to transcend the rivalries and betrayals from which she is born and seek out a middle path of justice, tolerance, and love.

Commissioned by Peter Sellars for his New Crowned Hope Festival in Vienna, Pamina Devi is "a must see. Sophiline Cheam Shapiro's exotic realm of bejeweled dancers and formal patterns, full of elegance, filled the stage. Every finger of each backwardly arched hand, each raised foot while kneeling, all were accomplished with a calmly deliberate and beautifully fluid motion. This was an amazing experience." (Salzburger Nachrichten)

In Khmer with English supertitles.

Please note there will be no late seating for this performance.

Lecture: Foodgetting, Ritual, and Values in Cambodia

Friday, Oct 12,
12 noon
U-M School of Social Work, Room 1636 (1080 S. University Ave.)

To say that the king rules in Cambodia is to say that the king 'eats' his kingdom, and the people in it. Far from being an unusual way of imagining rule, it is common both to the region, and beyond it. This presentation draws on recent fieldwork to address long-standing questions about the relationship between different forms of cultural subsistence and the religious imagination. Erik Davis contends that different forms of subsistence methods profoundly influence the ways in which cultures imagine the world, especially the conceptual ghost haunting the anthropological imagination, 'power.' Archaeology and anthropology have, despite ongoing debates, largely agreed that different subsistence means lead directly to certain general but crucial results in the culture itself. This presentation will move from archaeology to psychological anthropology in an attempt to demonstrate the unity of concerns that these share, and to identify important areas of too-often neglected concern. Drawing on works by Condominas, Hanks, Rappaport, and Castoriadis, Davis will present a general schematic of the argument, and then exemplify it with Cambodian examples drawn from historical research and personal fieldwork.

For more information, contact the U-M Center for South East Asian Studies at
734-764-0352

A collaboration with the U-M Center for South East Asian Studies.

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• Khmer Arts Academy Website
• Preview in the New York Times
• Pamina Devi in the Critics Notebook section of the New Yorker
• Review in the New York Times
• Review in The Village Voice
• Review in the Bloomberg Review
• Article in the Ann Arbor News

Funded in part by the Wallace Endowment Fund, the Performing Arts Fund, and the National Dance Project of the New England Foundation for the Arts. The 07/08 Family Series is sponsored by Toyota.