THE SCHOOL BEHIND IT
Phare Ponleu Selpak: the Battambang Art School Behind Phare
Every Siem Reap ticket supports Phare Ponleu Selpak, a Battambang arts school founded by young Cambodians returning from refugee camps — how the two connect.
See Phare dates on GetYourGuide ↗Founded by returning refugees, in 1994
Phare Ponleu Selpak — its name is generally translated as "the brightness of the arts" — was founded in Battambang in 1994 by a small group of young Cambodians who had grown up in a refugee camp on the Thai border in the aftermath of the Khmer Rouge period and the conflict that followed. They had taken drawing and art-therapy classes in the camp, and on returning home began teaching those same skills to other young people in Battambang, using art as a way to process what they'd lived through and to give younger children something constructive to do. That grassroots beginning grew into a full arts school and, eventually, a professional circus.
More than a circus school
Phare Ponleu Selpak today runs training in visual arts, music, theatre, animation and circus arts, alongside general education and social support for children and young people in and around Battambang, including many from disadvantaged backgrounds. The circus is the most visible, income-generating branch, but it sits inside a much broader organisation whose core purpose is education and child welfare, not performance for its own sake. Students can move between disciplines, and many spend years in the school before any of them set foot on a professional stage, let alone the one in Siem Reap.
How a Siem Reap ticket funds a Battambang school
Phare, The Cambodian Circus — the professional show most visitors see in Siem Reap — opened as the organisation's social enterprise, built specifically to generate reliable income for the school roughly two and a half hours away in Battambang. Ticket sales fund scholarships, teaching and wider welfare programmes, and also pay salaries to the graduates who perform, effectively making the show the school's main funding engine. It's the kind of structure often described as a "social enterprise" — a self-sustaining business whose profits serve a non-profit mission, rather than a school that simply relies on donations.
From student to professional performer
Most of the artists on stage in Siem Reap trained at Phare Ponleu Selpak from a young age, often for years, before joining the professional circus company — meaning the acrobat you watch tonight may well have started as a child taking free classes in Battambang. That pipeline gives performers a genuine career path in the arts, something rare in Cambodia, and it's part of why Phare frames its shows as being about opportunity as much as entertainment. Buying a ticket supports the students currently coming up behind them, and helps keep the school's doors open for the next intake of local children.
Why this shapes what you're booking
Understanding the school behind the show changes what a Phare ticket actually is — not just an evening's entertainment, but a direct contribution to arts education and youth welfare in Battambang. It's also worth being clear-eyed about the structure: the Siem Reap venue and company operate as a commercial business, and it's that business's profits, channelled back to the school, that make the arrangement work — a specific, traceable pipeline rather than a vague "for a cause" claim attached to a ticket. Knowing that history is part of what makes a Phare night feel different from an ordinary show.