A Journey Home: a Cambodian-American dance story
About
"A Journey Home" blends dance, memory, and ritual to trace the journey of a Cambodian- American family navigating separation and loss. Through a series of seven poetic scenes, the piece honors ancestral wisdom while illuminating the emotional complexity of migration, deportation and generational healing. The performance opens with a collective demonstration of kbach, the fundamental gestures of Cambodian classical dance. Dancers slowly transform these gestures into a symbolic tree, rooting themselves in ancestral knowledge and storytelling through movement. Displaced to a new land, following years of genocide and war, the family becomes entangled in a struggle between tradition and transformation, suggesting that choices made in pursuit of hope may come at a great cost. Story by Peter Veth Staging and set design by Chummeng Soun Music by Him Sophy and Cambodian Living Arts, Phnom Penh, Cambodia Dancers in Khmer Urban Ballet, based in Lowell, Massachusetts, have each had decades of training in classical Cambodian (Khmer) dance, an art form with centuries of history related to nature, spirituality, and royalty. (This art was inscribed by UNESCO as part of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity in 2008.) The altar they place upstage is a locus of reverence for ancestral and cultural knowledge of the art and stories. Before every performance they ask their teachers and the spirits of teachers who have passed for guidance and blessings by lighting incense and candles, offeri
