Third Annual Cambodian Living Arts National Youth Arts Festival > Smot at the Festival
One of the highlights of the Festival was a a smotperformance by Masters Prum Uth and Keot Ran, from Kompong Speu province.
Many of Master Prum Uth's students, all coming from the local village around Kompong Speu, were very shy about their smot studies before coming to the Festival. Oftentimes, other children associate smot with ghosts and funerals, and they were not interested in what they considered to be a spooky art form.
But at the Festival, the demonstrations on smot and other forms of funeral music were one of the most popular components of the Festival, and the smot students from Kompong Speu beamed with pride in sharing their knowledge with novice students.
In this way, the Festival was a wonderful opportunity for the students to build confidence and to reinforce for one another that they were all part of something important and big--a huge, nationwide movement of cultural revitalization and change.
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