Prumsodun Ok
Long Beach, CA
Prumsodun Ok is an artist and cultural activist based in Long Beach, California where he teaches filmmaking to inner-city youth with the YMCA Youth Institute, is a videographer for the Cambodian Community History and Archiving Project, and teaches classical Cambodian dance at the Khmer Arts Academy, as well as serving as its curator and media designer. Most recently Ok was awarded 2011 Artist Fellowship from the Association for Performing Arts Presenters in it’s the inaugural year of their fellows program. Ok draws upon beliefs of reincarnation and the ritualistic, meditative language of Cambodian classical dance to illustrate a relationship transcendent of form and image, gender and sexuality, to say clearly: “Let love live.”
“Robam Lom Arom”
In the stillness of night, Neang Sovann Atmani bathes in a river as she waits for her absent husband. She succumbs to the phantom weight of his memory and gives herself to its caress. Drawing upon the hypnotic, serpentine vocabulary of Cambodian classical dance and personal history, Prumsodun Ok interweaves text, video, sound and movement to create a world of longing. Through reincarnation and the image of the sacred androgyne — spirits that manifest themselves differently with each life, a brahmin that is half-male and half-female — Ok invites us to contemplate the fluidity between vinhean (spirit) and rub (form), man and woman.