A vast $2.7 million festival of all Cambodian arts took place in New York City in April, the first ever event of its kind. 125 artists of all disciplines arrived in the city to perform or exhibit at as many as 30 different institutions across the city. From BAM and the Metropolitan Museum to the Joyce Theatre, Asia Society and several downtown galleries, not a single seat or piece of artwork was left unseen or unattended.

‘Season of Cambodia : A Living Arts Festival’ had multiple significance. Many people were surprised by the diversity and skill on offer, but above all the month-long event proved one thing decisively – that for all his skills at genocide, the dictator Pol Pot failed in his attempt to annihilate the country’s rich artistic life.

Moreover, not only has this resplendent 800-year old culture been resuscitated in little more than a decade but it has sprouted new and important growths, not only in contemporary dance but also the visual arts, both of which can already stand comparison with equivalents in Singapore, Beijing and Seoul.

Some history might be necessary. In tracing the roots of Cambodian culture, it seems that much of what we see today bears strong traces of the Hindu Brahmanist culture brought from Southern India through trading routes via Indonesia. By the 1960s Cambodian culture reached its zenith of modern times, liberated from French colonial negligence and, post 1956, emerging as an essential element of a proud independent nation.

The crux of its identity, and which delighted New Yorkers in April, is the classical dance style known as robam borann, the courtly recreations of the lengthy Hindu Ramayana story, performed at Angkor for the Gods and later within the exclusive confines of the Royal Palace.

The style emerged over many centuries but it was Sisowath Kossamak, the mother of the late King Norodom Sihanouk who created the Cambodian Royal Ballet in the form we know today, choreographing a number of new works during the 1960s. Kossamak democratized robam borann, bringing the genre out of the palace into society at large, while conferring on the dancers the status of civil servants.

Among her creations was the dance called Apsara Mera, for many the embodiment of the classical style and intended specifically for the greatest dancer of that generation – her own granddaughter, the young Princess Norodom Buppa Devi. The same princess, now in her 60s, directs the company the Royal Ballet today. The locus of her achievement has been the north campus of the rejuvenated Royal University of Fine Arts in Phnom Penh, where dancers as young as six years old arrive for daily rehearsals.

New York was treated to Apsara Mera at the Brooklyn Academy of Music with a hand-picked team that included dancers Chap Chamroeun Mina, who now lives in Paris, and Chey Sophea, who just returned to Cambodia from New Zealand. The Princess had gaven a rare interviewed on the dance style a few days earlier at Lincoln Centre during which the audience was shown old footage of her performing the same dance back in 1968.

The Joyce Theatre hosted Khmer Arts Academy, a privately-funded classical dance company created by former Royal Ballet classical dancer Sophiline Cheam Shapiro. As witnessed in earlier versions of Otello (Samritachek) and Mozart’s Magic Flute (Pamina Devi) KAA specializes in giving distinctly modern twists not only to classical pieces but to local folk tales and even western plays and opera.

The Ramayana story of Rama’s love and rescue of Sita at the centre of the Cambodian cultural narrative emerged in various forms. For many attendees, the highlight of the festival was the large shadow puppet troupe (sbeak thom) from the temple of Wat Bo in Cambodia’s Siem Reap. They gave two performances at the World Financial Centre at the tip of Manhattan within a vast glass atrium, populated, appropriately enough by tall palms.

Contemporary performance art has been slow to emerge in Cambodia: so much was lost during the Khmer Rouge that this kind of innovation was never considered a priority. It has been through the efforts of the NGO Amrita Performing Arts that dancers have slowly adopted a uniquely Cambodian modern chorographic style.

Amrita’s moment of inspiration was to commission a series of pieces from by Khmer/French choreographer Emmanuèle Phuon, a former royal ballet dancer now based in Paris. The result was a series of three dances based on the monkey dance movements which she called Khmeropedies. The last of these was performed at the Guggenheim Museum and solicited rave reviews from the New York Times.

These troupes have been widely toured abroad, but it was only in New York that the fruits of their labour were so dramatically realized. Those responsible for the revival of this culture are wide-ranging and come from various quarters. Cambodians may hold the key to the effort, but little could have happened without the financial support that began to arrive after the opening up of the country after the election of 1993.

UNESCO made the classical dance style an World Heritage Site, while the Asia Cultural Council, Ford and Rockefeller Foundations established mentorships programs to facilitate the continuity of numerous classical genres and reconstruct oeuvres held only in fragile memories.

The principle producer of ‘Season of Cambodia’ was the NGO Cambodian Living Arts (CLA), whose Chairman John Burt conceived the festival almost a decade ago. However it was its Cambodian Executive Director Phlouen Prim who was responsible for raising the lion’s sum of the funding, a considerable achievement in these cash-strapped times.

CLA’s founder is Arn Chorn Pond. A former Khmer Rouge child soldier transported from a Thai refugee camp to Massachusetts by the Lutheran pastor, Chorn-Pond was orphaned in the mid 70s when Pol Pot took charge of the country. Put to work playing the khim to entertain Khmer Rouge cadres in Northwestern Battambang province, it was his skill in mastering this dulcimer-like instrument that he claims saved his life.

Determination to find his khim teacher, master player Youen Mek, Chorn-Pond returned to Cambodia in 1998 and its is their emotional reunion that set the scene for what eventually became CLA, which is dedicated to the resuscitation of surviving musicians throughout Cambodia, many of whom had been popular stars during the 1960s. ‘I was finding master teachers living on the streets – poor, weak, without food and basic healthcare’, says Chorn-Pond.

The fruits of this labour was showcased in New York. Arn played at the Lincoln Centre with the Waterek Ensemble, an ensemble of Cambodian musicians based in Phnom Penh that includes Mek as well as chapei player Kong Nay. Chorn-Pond has formed a close-knit community of around a hundred musicians who tutored one another’’s children in different disciplines.

Film was an important medium in the 1960s, but one that suffered badly at the hands of the Khmer Rouge. It has since bounced back with a dozen films produced or shot in Cambodia in the last two years, as well as numerous documentaries. A group of contemporary film has put together by Cambodian auteur Rithy Panh, whose films did much to highlight Khmer Rouge atrocities.

Finally, the organizers of Season of Cambodia were intent on counterpointing performance with discussion in a wide-ranging Humanities programme. Several lectures and symposiums by authorities on Cambodian life and culture aimed to untangle some of the mysteries of this enchanting country. Memory, an important tool in the process of reconciliation, was addressed in a series of workshops. As this festival has shown, Cambodia has already done so much to ‘move on’.