Traditional Performing Arts in Siem Reap & Angkor Wat
A visual guide from the Siem Reap and Angkor Wat travel guide — see all posters in Visual Guides.
Under a red-and-white big top off Sok San Road, a dozen performers in their twenties throw each other over a stack of chairs while a live band drives them from the wings. Phare, the Cambodian Circus, is the show most visitors remember, and it sits closer to contemporary physical theatre than to anything with a ringmaster. The older forms are quieter and more technical: dancers whose fingers bend backwards into codified positions, and leather puppets a metre and a half tall held against a lit screen while a gong-and-drum orchestra keeps time.
What to see
Phare performs nightly under its tent near Sok San Road, usually around eight and running a little over an hour; tickets are typically USD 18 to 38, and the cast trains at the Battambang arts school the company grew out of. Apsara dance, the slow hand-led classical form rebuilt after the 1970s from a handful of surviving teachers, is staged at dinner theatres such as Koulen and on several hotel stages, where the buffet is ordinary and the dancing is not. Sbek thom, the large shadow puppetry, is kept going by the troupe at Wat Bo and performed irregularly, so ask locally rather than assume a fixed schedule.
How to read a performance
Classical Khmer dance is a vocabulary rather than a plot: four basic hand positions stand for leaf, flower, fruit and seed, and training begins young because the finger and elbow hyperextension takes years to acquire. The accompaniment is pinpeat, built from xylophones, circles of tuned gongs, the reedy sralai and drums, tuned to a scale that sounds slightly askew to Western ears entirely on purpose. Chapei dang veng, a long-necked two-string lute played alongside improvised sung verse, is the folk counterpart and is listed by UNESCO as needing urgent safeguarding. Shows start early by nightlife standards, so plan to eat afterwards rather than before.