For those familiar with the Reamker epic, the performance of which could often stretch to twelve hours, this aerial attack by apocalyptic Frankenstein birds was an affront to the very form of Lkhaon Nang Sbek. Before the Khmer Rouge came to power, the Reamker was performed by a wide range of puppeteers, actors, and dancers, from regional groups on up to the Royal Cambodian Ballet. While each performer was allowed a certain personal flourish, it was also critical that they stayed within a strict, familiar framework. Every Cambodian knew the story by heart, so it was not uncommon for audience members to leave and return over the course of the day, instantly recognizing where they were in the story. Thus, the manner of Kirkenesferda’s narrative disruption was deeply forbidden. The group had painstakingly honored the form with their meticulous reenactment, only to completely disregard it with their experimental blitzkrieg.
Soon the birds returned with more items for their nest: tiny musical instruments, presumably taken from the pinpeat band, who had begun to stop playing one by one as the birds stole their instruments, until only a fiddle remained. Left alone, the fiddle started to play wild, chaotic strokes — an excerpt from John Cage’s Freeman Etudes.
Fig. 4.14. Notations from “Freeman Etude #18,” by John Cage
From Røed-Larsen, P., Spesielle Partikler, p. 749
The birds brought still more things to the nest: numbers, pieces of mathematical equations, Greek symbols. When the nest had grown to tremendous proportions, it began to tremble and then exploded, sending the birds flying offstage. The fiddle music ceased. The stage went black except for a single red spotlight. A mist appeared, and then puppet figures, dressed in those same familiar black outfits of the Khmer Rouge, began to move around the stage, their faces masked by krama scarves. One by one, these scarves came off, revealing tiny television screens instead of faces. Each screen showed the curiously gentle visage of Pol Pot, smiling, nodding, on a loop. There were two dozen, then three dozen Pol Pot figurines wandering around the stage, smiling, nodding to one another.
Each of these puppets, designed by Kermin Radmanovic and Tor Bjerknes, was an astonishing work of art — the inner mechanics of their one-off design were complex beyond belief. But while exceedingly intricate, each puppet had also been carefully designed to withstand the rigorous environment of the humid jungle, for a single short circuit would have ruined the entire choreography of the show.
Fig. 4.15. Figure of Sequence 9a, 12: “Intermingling puppets, cascading, choreographed Brownian motion.”
From Røed-Larsen, P., Spesielle Partikler, p. 768
The fiddle music returned, amplified and warped, as if fed through a synthesizer. The lights shifted, flickering; the steam billowed toward the audience. The Pol Pot puppets started to vibrate with increasing violence, and when the boiling reached a certain point, they collapsed onto the stage. An 8mm projector began projecting video of marching troops from Maoist China, superimposed on diagrams from Henrik Bohr (Niels’s son) and H. B. Nielsen’s “Hadron Production from a Boiling Quark Soup” (Nuclear Physics, 1977), depicting the dissolution of quark soup bubbles and hadron decay immediately following the Big Bang.
As the smoke began to clear, the puppet bodies rose up again, but now their robes had come off, and the figures were revealed to be birdlike themselves — half avian and half humanoid, a circulatory system of electrical wires and twine intermingled within their skeletons. Yet by all accounts, what was astonishing about this part of the show, from both a technical and an emotional standpoint, was that the body parts of the figurines began to interchange: arms were traded between figures, heads were swapped. The stage, as Røed-Larsen writes, “had become an elaborate marketplace of beingness” (776).
Fig. 4.16. “Revised Dock & Pulley System. Reverse Ball & Socket Joint Guywire v4.3.”
From Røed-Larsen, P., Spesielle Partikler, p. 777
While this flurry of exchange took hold of the puppets, the footage of Pol Pot’s face on the headscreens being passed back and forth was gradually replaced by images of prisoners from S-21, photographs that had been released only months before. The Khmer Rouge leaders were staring into the eyes of the very victims they had helped to execute. Yet these victims were not dead; they were performing in an act “of nostalgia-play, re-animation, re-appropriation. . the executed dancing for the executioners” (828).
Slowly, the trading of body parts diminished and each figure became identifiable again. The music stopped. The figures collected toward the front of the stage and formed a line, facing the audience. Their screens flickered and then, as one, displayed a long equation:
An expression of the uncertainty principle in harmonic analysis.
One of the puppets in the middle of the equation’s head was not like the others. His screen still showed a cheerful Pol Pot — the puppet had in fact been displaying this image the entire time. In an unsettling act of coordinated scrutiny, all the other puppets turned their screen heads toward him. Then his screen went blank, except for a dot, which winked out the Morse code:
Curtain down.
“A terrible silence followed,” writes Røed-Larsen. “You could hear a sewing pin drop — if such a sewing pin had still existed in Cambodia” (788). Everyone turned to Pol Pot, the impromptu guest of honor, in order to read his response to such an audacious display of insubordination. The small man sat perfectly still, and then his face broke into a broad grin and he started to clap, vociferously, as the Khmer Rouge were prone to do during important ceremonies. A sigh of relief must have passed over Khieu Samphan and his comrades. Everyone stood, joining in the applause. The crucial moment had passed.
Under orders, the assembled Khmer Rouge soldiers dispersed, preparing to secure the camp for the night. The Kirkenesferda troupe quietly went about the mundane task of disassembling their lights and packing up their theater wagon, though their heads and hearts were no doubt buzzing with that unique post-show mixture of adrenaline, sadness, hunger, and relief. Once they were finished, a Khmer Rouge cadre escorted them to their quarters.
Shortly after this (Røed-Larsen does not offer an exact amount of time), Ieng Sary approached Raksmey. His demeanor had changed drastically. He was now furious, and he accused the group of being CIA operatives.
“I have read my history,” Røed-Larsen reports Sary saying to Raksmey (801). “I know the puppeteers of Europe were also spies. They were the only ones who were allowed to cross over borders, because no one suspected them.” As evidence, he produced part of the telegraph wire that had been connected to the radio tower. Caught unaware, unsure whether such a wire was a fabrication, Raksmey did his best at damage control, assuring his hosts that if the wire had indeed existed, then certainly no message had been sent, and that their position had not been transmitted to a foreign entity (as Sary claimed). Raksmey promised a full report on the wire’s purpose. Sary, threatening imprisonment or worse, reluctantly retreated to discuss the situation with the senior Khmer Rouge officers, including Pol Pot, who presumably had been behind this sudden change in attitude.