Tradition · Khmer masked dance-drama
Lkhon Khol
/lkʰaon kʰaol/
Also known as Lakhon Khol, Lkhaôn Khaôl, Khmer masked theatre, Khol, ល្ខោនខោល
Cambodia's all-male masked dance-drama of the Reamker, performed with narrators and a pin peat orchestra. Its best-kept form, at the monastery village of Wat Svay Andet on the Mekong about ten kilometres east of Phnom Penh, is a ritual rather than a show: it is staged to propitiate the Neak Ta, the guardian spirits of the place, and to protect the rice harvest. UNESCO listed it for urgent safeguarding in 2018.
- Function
- Arts & performance
- Confidence
- Mixed / layered
Worth knowing
War and the Khmer Rouge broke its transmission for fourteen years, from 1970 to 1984, and UNESCO counts aged practitioners among the threats to its survival.
Claims that masked khol goes back to the Angkor period rest on tenth-century inscriptions mentioning masked dancers and on a scholar's reading of the Angkor Wat reliefs; the Wikipedia article on the genre is poorly sourced.
Connections (3)
- AnalogueKhon
Thai khon and Cambodian lkhon khol are sister forms: traditionally all-male masked dance-dramas of the Ramayana, danced to narration and orchestra, the Thai telling the Ramakien and the Khmer the Reamker. Khon grew as a court art, while the best-kept lkhon khol is performed for a village's guardian spirits, and at its thirteenth session in November 2018 UNESCO's committee inscribed both together, khon on the Representative List and Lkhon Khol Wat Svay Andet on the List in Need of Urgent Safeguarding.
- Ramayana traditionReamker
Lkhon khol's repertoire is the Reamker, and the Khmer verse texts of the epic composed from the fifteenth century onward were written as recitatives for it. Its plays were codified in the reign of Ang Duong in the mid-nineteenth century, and a 1948 magazine report on the Wat Svay Andet troupe described its plays, such as the Reamker, as performed for the divinities. At Wat Svay Andet men in masks still perform it with recitation and orchestra.
- Traditional linkAngkor Wat, Cambodia
Cambodians tie lkhon khol to Angkor. The dance scholar Paul Cravath argued that the Churning of the Ocean of Milk carved at Angkor Wat depicts an actual masked khol performance, and the khol plays codified under Ang Duong were based on the Reamker as shown in the twelfth-century Angkor Wat reliefs, whose western gallery carries the Battle of Lanka. The link is an interpretation of images rather than a documented line of performers.
On these journeys
Sources
UNESCO, Lkhon Khol Wat Svay Andet (2018). Wikipedia, "Lakhon Khol" and "Royal Ballet of Cambodia"; Paul Cravath, Earth in Flower, as cited there.
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