Dance Images in Temples of Mainland Southeast Asia ... - Repository

Acknowledgements
The research taking shape in this thesis stretches back three decades. Even on my fi rst visits
to South and Southeast Asia in the late 1970s I was struck by the obvious interrelatedness of
traditional dance and visual arts of the region. In the early 1980s I worked as a junior expert on
Asian culture at UNESCO in Bangkok. During that time I participated in a SPAFA (Southeast
Asia Ministers of Education Organization’s Project in Archaeology and Fine Arts) project on
documenting dance and dance theatre. In this connection I published a series of articles on the
close contacts between dance and the visual arts in the SPAFA Journal.
Later my continuous festival work in Finland and research abroad has enabled me to study
living Asian dance traditions further. I have touched upon the subject of the interrelation of
dance and visual arts in my books on Asian theatre, such as “Classical Dance and Theatre in
South-East Asia” (Oxford University Press, 1992). At the end of the 1990s I was invited to
give a series of lectures on Southeast Asian art and theatre history at Mahidol University in
Bangkok. The process of simultaneously teaching both dance and art history again evoked the
deep interrelatedness of these art forms, which led to the idea of a doctoral dissertation on this
subject.
Further research and the actual writing period were made possible by grants from the
Finnish Cultural Fund and the Finnish Theatre Academy, for which I am very grateful. The
process proved to be a long journey that took me back to many sites and museums I was already
familiar with from the 1970s and the 1980s as well as to places I had never explored before.
I visited Angkor in Cambodia and the temples of Pagan in Myanmar as well the historic city of
Ayutthaya in Thailand in 2003, the Khmer ruins of Northeast Thailand in 2004, South India and
Sri Lanka in 2005, Central Javanese temples in 2006, Sukhothai and the surrounding ruined
cities and temples and the National Museum of Songkhla in Thailand as well as the Danang
Museum of Champa sculpture in Vietnam in 2007 when the fi nal steps of this project took me
again to Angkor.
I am extremely grateful for the encouragement and constructive comments I received
from my supervisor at the Finnish Theatre Academy, Dr. Pentti Paavolainen, my advisors Dr.