A little dancing changes minds

In Cambodia, a country where individuals with disabilities are often kept out of school and the workplace, one non-governmental organisation is using dance and the arts to show that everyone has the exact same value.

Moving across the stage at the National Museum in Phnom Penh, six dancers perform an interpretative dance that combines modern flourishes with classical Khmer dance.

Hand and arm movements recall the deeply influential Apsara ballet, reinterpreted to narrate a story of agrarian life. But while the performance, entitled “Krama”, takes its inspiration from traditional culture, it is anything but traditional.

Interpretative dance is still a relatively new concept in Cambodia, but the most noticeable difference in this show is that all of the dancers are living with disabilities.

Five of the dancers are deaf, and one, Po Sakun, performs in and out of his wheelchair – an almost unheard-of feat in the country.

The performers are all members of Epic Encounters, the outreach branch of the Cambodian-British NGO Epic Arts, which works with disabled citizens. It runs several programmes in the town of Kampot, including classes for children with intellectual disabilities like Down syndrome and autism, and a two-year inclusive-arts course for older students learning to read, dance, put on stage shows and perform music.

Po Sakun found his calling as a dancer through the inclusive-arts course, through which he learned to use his body in new ways after losing the use of his legs during a childhood bout of polio.

“It was a little difficult in the beginning because I had to learn about myself and the best way to move my wheelchair to do what I wanted to do,” he says. “I didn’t have the proper dance wheelchair – mine was too big, so spinning around was difficult, but now I’ve got the right one.”

These days Po moves expressively in his wheelchair at performances in Britain, Singapore and Thailand to raise money for Epic Arts.

The main focus of his work, however, is going into local communities to help change traditional views that people with disabilities are inferior or worthless.

These attitudes exist despite the fact that, across the Asia-Pacific region, one in six individuals is living with a disability, according to the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (Unescap).

That number is likely even higher in Cambodia, where decades of war and millions of landmines have scarred the population physically and mentally.

In rural areas in particular, Po and others also fight deeply ingrained beliefs among the older generations. As Buddhists, many older people view disability is a punishment for a mistake made in a past life that earned “bad karma”, explains the Phnom Penh Centre for Independent Living. This is why many disabled people are kept out of school and public life and have difficulty finding jobs.

“Committing good receives good and committing bad receives bad, so people with disabilities are believed to have done bad things in a previous life, and that’s why they’re disabled in the present life,” the centre’s 2015 report says. “As such, people with disabilities are often discriminated against and shown little sympathy by other people in society.”

Po knows all too well what a childhood disability can feel like in Cambodia. As a young boy he believed he’d “earned” the loss of his legs because he’d been cruel in his past life.

He was relentlessly teased in school. “They didn’t say my name – they just referred to me by my disability.”

Village by village, Epic Arts hopes to change this attitude. “People see that, even if you have a disability, you can achieve and lead a successful life,” says Hayley Holden, head of marketing and communications at Epic Arts.

“Children who might never have otherwise met someone with a disability get a positive experience of people with disabilities and it helps at a young age to challenge and change their perceptions of disability.”

Epic Arts also receives commissions for special outreach projects. The German Agency for International Cooperation, for example, has funded a video project to educate health practitioners on how to treat people with disabilities, as well as an educational dance about safe sex.

Po participated in both.