As a youth of Cambodia, I should know about the history and what happened to my country. Not just learning about the good ones, but also learning about the painful ones that contain those hidden perspective and understanding. In this exploration, I can learn all briefly and deeply at the same time about the information from each era as well as how it transitions into the new ones. On the other hand, we mostly focus mainly on Khmer rouge genocide. That time it was a really dark and painful thing that ever happen to Cambodia. Instead of feeling sorrowful over this, we do something different. From my perspective, it also gives a good lesson for this new generation. We can clearly see how cruel and unhappy it was, so we as a new generation must not repeat in the same footsteps. Be happy with who we are today and keep developing our country. Be proud of what country had deveelop. 40 years after this genocide, I want other country to feel proud and impress for our country, that we can stand strong and don’t give up.
With all of those thoughts, we come up with different creative base ideas that we want to show it to everyone during our sharation. Our theme was to show different perspectives, so we form smaller groups for different projects. Those are, Poem, drawing, painting, song, dance, short stories and leader evaluation. I participated in Drawing, song and dance.
In the dance team, we choose contemporary dance, because we want to tell a story in the dance. I suggested some songs, and we pick it together. After I edited all of those songs, we create the story line together and I choreograph about 90% of the dance. In the dance we choose two characters as sisters and then we showcase their lives before Khmer rouge, during and after the Khmer rouge as well. The audience will see the transition from each era based on the way we dress up and the mood of the music.I love doing this, because it’s my passion. Even Though there are some challenges, but I am fine with it (practice with everyone in while they are doing multi task, teaching the moves, prepare the stage, change the outfit fast enough for each transition). I bleed my feet and got some bruises on my leg, but I’m happy for it, because all of the audience feedback makes me happy and their reactions make me feel even stronger.
I also join the song team, which we choose the Khmer rouge anthem song and keep the lyrics, but we create the new melody for it. We make it sound modernize and happy. I also translate the lyrics into English version, so that the foreienger audience can understand the meaning as well. We ask our senior (B chhoue) to help us produce the music.
The last project I joined is Portrait team. We pick leader or victims from s-21 ( A khmer rouge prison) to draw and show different perspectives. We drew the exact copy of the picture for the first drawing and then the second drawing will be modernized. Some students change their hair style, hair, clothes or even their sad face to look happy. We do this to imagine how would those people look like if they were in our present days.
So far, this was such an amazing experience for me. I can learn about my history and make new commitment to change Cambodia. Doing what I love (art base) will always turns out acceptable and make my day brighter.