I am the type of person who doesn’t usually follow the crowd. I’ve experienced Culturama Cambodia couple of times and I saw a trend of it, and I heard the feedback from people. I think when people heard of Cambodia, they expected slow motions, same old Apsara dances. Don’t get me wrong, I love the dance, but that is not all to it. Cambodia’s art has such interesting and exciting flavours to it. And I want to embrace it.

In the past, all the Khmer dances consisted of fully one very classical dances. It was amazing, however this year, I want something new and more and good. That’s why we decided to come up with the concepts of dancing to different eras of Cambodia. It begins with a very, beautiful, graceful classical dance of Khmer, existed thousands of years ago. Now, it’s usually only performed on very special occasions on stages by professional dancers. Then, it moves on to a song and dance from the 60s where Rock n Roll took a toll in Cambodia just before Khmer Rouge destroyed it all. Thirdly, it captures the dances more frequently danced by anybody during Khmer festivals such as Khmer New Year, Pchum Ben or Oum Touk…  Finally, we never forgot to inserts in classics moves like Rom Vong, Saravan and Jok Kompis where we all dance together to the last song, which describes how we are all so proud to be a Cambodian and that we will do whatever it takes to make Cambodia forever on top.

I think it was very well thought and designed dance. The only problem was that it means we have to create everything from scratch, there are no particular videos that we can learn from and none of us is a particularly good dancer. We just have to fake it till we make it. I mean, we are Cambodians after all.

We choreographed everything. The next problem arises when we got our group members and started to teach them the dance. I remembered the one rehearsal we had on Wednesday, in the auditorium, it was a clear mess. I was very disappointed, with everyone, and with myself. Being a dance leader has so much pressure on their shoulder, that the moment that it goes wrong, you realise immediately that something is needed to be done instantly.

I was so stressed, I was so mad because I want to make it good, and it doesn’t go as smoothly as I expected. I think I had so much on my shoulder at that time, that I actually skip TOK and went to the counsellor for it. A good time for me to reflect and think of what’s wrong and what can be done.

The next rehearsal was on the next day, Thursday. I recalled that I called everyone together, and I gave them a talk about how I felt. Thanks to IFP experience, the mood was set right, they realise that I am very serious of what I’m saying. And on that day, we finished learning the whole dance. The rest of the rehearsals were getting better, where we just have to correct everyone’s little details and energy.

I do think the moment where I face a problem, take a timeout, and come back knowing exactly what needed to be done and act accordingly so, was very needed to have a good performance. I’m glad I did it.