Music and dance in Sihanoukville

Music and dance in Sihanoukville, is like everywhere in Cambodia as many of the hill border tribes have each their own dance though the ethnic Cham community of Cambodia is no longer an active tradition of performing arts. In Sihanoukville, several Chinese community associations have the lion dance teams which perform during the lunar New Year and other Chinese festivals.

Like the rest of Cambodia, Sihanoukville residents have their own unique music and dance tradition, a production of art objects to propitiate the spirits and celebrate the many social milestones in the lives of members of the community.
Music instruments are crafted with great ingenuity from natural material such as stone, wood, gourd, bamboo, animal horn. They are always ready to accompany a wide range of solo and group songs and dances.

Most of the Cambodia’s hill tribes have their own dances, which originated largely as a celebration of everyday events and past times and in Sihanoukville, the nearby hill tribes, do perform this music and dances from time to time.

Many of these have been adapted for theatre presentations over 50 years. The best known ethnic minority dances are the skori (bamboo), dance of the stieng, the warrior dance of the kui, the buffalo sacrifice and hot (bamboo pipe), dances of the jarai, plus a range of dances by the pearic people which include the wild ox dance, the sen ploy, spirit possession dance and the peacock of the pear, the ritual and drum dances of the suoy and the port chor rung dance of the Samre.

Today, there are many modern nightclubs which provide western music and dance which have completely taken the old ethnic music and dance practices though they are still performed by the local natives while a tourist can still have fun to any kind of music in Sihanoukville.