Voan Savay

In 2018, Voan Savay organized a collaboration with students from France's 'Conservatoire de danse de Bagnolet and her own Children of Bassac, all aged 12 to 17, featuring a mix of Western classical and contemporary ballet, as well as Cambodian folk and classical dance. It was titled De l’Ombre à la Lumière – “From shadow to light” with as a finale an original choreography by Edith Bellomo, professor at the Conservatory.

On top of teaching, she continues to play an active role in the Khmer Ballet in which she still performed in 2018 at age 68, with an unfading enthusiasm and energy.

After two decades in France, Voan Savay re-established herself in Phnom Penh in 2016 at the invitation of Princess Buphadevi and Prince Tesso Sissowath who were eager to transmit the heritage of the last living apsara of Cambodia. She became an artistic director at the Center of Cambodian Living Arts (ECLA) with director Jean-Baptiste Phou.

In 1991, after almost a decade in the camps, Voan and her young dancers were invited to the United States of America to carry out a three-month tour, during which she helped set up the Khmer Royal Ballet in California. As democracy returned to Cambodia, she settled back in Phnom Penh, but after the 1997 coup, she fled the country once more to find asylum in France, where she and her husband lived for two decades teaching Cambodian traditional dance.

Following the fall of the regime in 1979, Voan moved back to Phnom Penh and married another dancer, Van Roeun, a folk dancer, who was a graduate of the Royal University of Fine Arts. Though she managed to perform for the Communist government, her life was still miserable and in 1981, she and her husband decided to leave Cambodia and headed towards a refugee camp on the Thai border where she set up a dance school in the Cultural center of Site Two Refugee Camp with the help of the United Nations Border Relief Operation and Catholic Office for Emergency Relief and Refugees as the artists lacked costumes, musical instruments and equipment required for the performances. There, Voan Savay managed to find more than 100 dancers, and reunited with a former palace musician, Proeung Pruon, who had accompanied her when she danced in the 1960s and early 1970s. He and other accomplished artists formed a pin peat ensemble in Ampil sub-camp of Site 2, specifically for the classical dances. Savay started to document the dance. She began to notate, in narrative form, gestures and movements for particular characters in the classical repertoire. Before the war and revolution, no such documentation had been undertaken in Cambodia.

In 1965, she joined the first trip to China with Khmer Royal Ballet. In 1971, Voan Savay was the star Apsara dancer with the Khmer Royal Ballet troupe when they went on tour to the United States.

Voan Savay was born in 1950. As a child, she was introduced to the Khmer Royal Ballet at the Royal Palace. At age 12, she started travelling across Cambodia with the Khmer Royal Ballet for performances. In 1965, at the age of 15, she was crowned the prima ballerina or principal dancer, where she punctually replaced princess Bopha Devi, a position she held until 1970 when the royal family collapsed.