By Anna Blair β Published December 9, How Cambodian culture was hijacked by the French colonial projectβand helped inspire Rodin. Here Rodin drew them incessantly, obsessively. Rodin did not represent the dancers realistically. Instead he recorded his psychological impressions, capturing the energy of Cambodian dance using techniques from European art. But it also highlights the importance of public spectacles of cultural difference in pre-war Franceβspectacles like the Colonial Exposition.
It was the first trip of a Cambodian monarch to France. The Cambodian dancers performed in the Theatre of the Indochinese Pavilion modeled on the Bayon temple in Cambodia alongside a short film showing images of Indochina. Javanese dancers at the and Expositions had been the only non-European dancers to perform in France in recent years. There was, accordingly, great excitement for the Cambodian performances in A poster advertising the Exposition, prominently featuring a Cambodian dancer.
Wikimedia Commons. By , Auguste Rodin was a highly public figure. Rodin Museum. In Paris he attended two shows. After their departure, Rodin copied the images again in his studio, outlined them in graphite and highlighted them using watercolor and gouache, arriving at a total of around sketches.
It is this Orientalist view of Cambodian culture that led him to consider the Cambodian dancers as ideal models, their bodies and movements uncorrupted by modern living. This view of the Cambodian dancers as intimately linked with antiquity can be seen in the drawings themselves. The garments Rodin draws are simple but voluminous, large planes of fabric tied around the body like the togas of Western antiquity, as in Cambodian Dancer, in Right Profile.
Movements, too, cannot be definitely linked to Cambodian dance; they are loose echoes of the dance Rodin sees. This view of the Cambodian Royal Ballet as having sprung from stone, as holdovers from antiquity, can be seen elsewhere.
