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The performing arts of Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia share a close cultural kinship, with a thousand-year history of interaction between Thai, Lao, and Cambodian artists in times of both peace and conflict. Historical adoption of each other’s performing art elements has derived from, for example, royal court intermarriage and employment of foreign instructors, but also from the enslavement of royal court troupes as war captives. This complex multidirectional history of interaction informs contemporary conflicts of ownership over shared performing arts elements between Thai, Lao, and Cambodian peoples, especially in online spaces.
In this dissertation I discuss the cultural relationship between the performing arts ensembles of Colorado’s Thai, Lao, and Cambodian communities as a way to contextualize their recent efforts toward intercultural collaboration. Interactions among Thai, Lao, and Cambodian diaspora communities are heavily shaped by homeland notions of kinship and conflict between these three cultures, particularly regarding the performing arts. However, factors of place and time have encouraged the performing arts ensembles of Colorado to greatly increase their efforts in intercultural collaboration with each other since the covid pandemic, drawing on these homeland notions of kinship and conflict. Through the study of this phenomenon, I hope to shed light on the ways that related diasporic communities negotiate their intercultural relationships through the arts, despite the pervasive presence of divisive rhetoric. As I am myself a member of the Thai community, I employ autoethnography and activist ethnomusicology to address my own efforts to sustain the endangered arts programs of my diaspora community and its cultural neighbors through this research.
