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Gala at Angkor: 'Cue the Monks,' Then the Tenor
By SETH MYDANSDEC. 7, 2002
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Lightning flickered behind the great temple of Angkor Wat, and the sky growled and grumbled as if unsure what to make of this evening of laser lights, music and fine dining.

With 150 dancers, 32,000 flowers, 20 life-size ice carvings, 4 elephants, 70 chefs and the Spanish tenor José Carreras, this was going to be an evening unlike anything in the 900-year history of the monument.

''Maybe the gods are angry at us for having an ostentatious time at their temple,'' one guest said during a brief sprinkle of rain, slipping over her head a sort of plastic dwarf cape provided by the organizers. With tickets costing as much as $1,500, this was the least they could do.

It was a year ago that a high-ranking Cambodian official said the time had come to rev up the old ruin with things like sound-and-light shows, zigzag escalators and hot-air balloons. ''Angkor is asleep,'' said the official, Chea Sophorn. ''We will wake it up.''

Since a rough-edged peace came to this battered country in 1997, tourist visits to the Angkor temples have risen from almost zero toward a projected one million in 2005. The temples are already swarming. The question is whether their aura and dignity can be preserved as they are roused from their centuries of sleep in the jungles.

''We are going to set the tone for future events like this,'' said Gilbert Madhavan, general manager of Grand Hôtel d'Angkor, who organized tonight's 1,000-seat gala outside the eastern entrance to the temple. He was treading a fine line that made some Cambodians and foreigners uneasy.

''Cue the monks,'' quipped one of the organizers as the evening began and 120 Buddhist monks in their orange robes -- each wearing a laminated ''José Carreras Charity Concert'' identification card -- took their places along the temple's pillared galleries.

They looked magnificent, splayed across the facade of the great stone building. There were small splashes of orange, too, at windows in the high towers.

It was their robes that were being used to enhance the evening, though, not their religion, here in Cambodia's most venerated Buddhist shrine. The temple, it turns out, is a stage manager's dream, with its five looming towers, its grand porticos and its layered rows of pillars.

''It's the best set I've ever worked on,'' said Nigel Jamieson, the evening's artistic director. Along with Mr. Carreras, Mr. Jamieson was the creative force of the night. His shifts of projected light, color and silhouette embraced the architecture of the building, bringing out unexpected aspects of its beauty. It glowed, it darkened, it softened, it loomed.

At one heart-stopping moment it came alive as the carved maidens of its ancient bas-reliefs seemed to melt from the walls and emerge, in a troupe of seven classical dancers, through the main portico.

Their slow, liquid movements brought a delicacy and fragile beauty that defied the word spectacle. Their art carries with it an inner soul impervious to its surroundings.

At that point the guests had just begun their mushroom soup, and the dining area was filled with chatter and good cheer. ''How about that, ladies and gentlemen,'' said the master of ceremonies, Jill Neubronner, a CNN correspondent, as the dancers, almost floating, disappeared again into the temple.

''History, culture, legend, all rolled into one,'' she said a few minutes later after a troupe of male dancers had performed a monkey dance, ending the show's Cambodian part.

Everything but religion. Angkor Wat is sacred for Buddhists, who make pilgrimmages here from around the country and from neighboring Thailand and Vietnam. ''For us it is not a spectacle but a temple,'' said Vann Moulyvan, the former cultural curator of Angkor who was removed for his refusal to compromise on commercial development. ''What they are presenting seems to me more on the spectacle side.'' On the other hand, Leang Chun, abbott of the North Angkor Temple, a small modern-day temple set beside the ancient one, said he thought the spectacle was fine.

''We Buddhists don't mind about other people,'' he said. ''We are always happy that foreigners come and bring development.''

The concert itself earned less than its organizers had hoped -- about $40,000 for each of four sponsoring charities. It was the country's very lack of development that helped drive up the cost. Almost everything, from table linens to food to flowers to electrical wiring, had to be brought in from abroad.

''This surely came from Cambodia,'' said Michael Storrs, one of the organizers, tapping his foot on the wooden planks that formed the stage. ''But not much else.''

The diners had moved on to their chocolate tarts, enriched with 220 pounds of macadamia nuts, when the Singapore Symphony Orchestra took the stage, bathed in violet light, and began tuning its instruments, accompanied by the buzz of cicadas.

Then, within a nimbus of white light, ''the moment we've been waiting for,'' said Ms. Neubronner. Mr. Carreras emerged from what might have been his dressing room, Angkor Wat. As his voice rose through the thick tropical night, the temple dimmed in a copper green light and the audience leaned forward. Across the centuries, two great art forms of architecture and music met.

He sang Italian and Spanish songs, and with each number the temple behind him was transformed -- pale red or taupe or green, its towers dominating or receding or stark in milky silhouette.

As the building asserted itself, so did the world that has surrounded it through all the changes of history.

In the silence between each song, the night was filled with the trilling and whistling of insects and the music of frogs and nocturnal birds -- the nightly concert whose audience is the stones and the stars.

Mr. Carreras's encore, ''Some Enchanted Evening,'' seemed to take some of the magic from the occasion, but that was only momentary, as was the entire attempt to wake up Angkor Wat.

Throughout the gala evening, no matter how many drummers, dancers, elephants and bottles of champagne, the real magic was elsewhere, just a short walk away.

There, on the dark side of Angkor Wat, hulking and silent with its silhouetted sugar palms, the temple stood in the moonlight as it has for hundreds of years, its mystery still impervious and unplumbed.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/07/world/gala-at-angkor-cue-the-monks-then-the-tenor.html


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