Everyone visits Angkor Wat - here's the Cambodian experience you're missing

Just in front of me, lithe circus performers are defying gravity in a dozen ways: vaulting, tumbling, spinning through the air, juggling, balancing, forming human pyramids and more. But that's not all. Through physical theatre, dance and modern circus arts, they're telling a story of rejection, spiritual possession, revenge and eventual forgiveness based on Cambodian folktales. A story that's particularly powerful given Cambodia's troubled history during the Khmer Rouge period when dancers, musicians and artists were ruthlessly killed.

With so much to absorb, it takes me a little while to fully appreciate the captivating three-person band, which provides the show's mesmerising soundtrack on wooden xylophone, drums and cymbals. Their transporting music is the rhythmic glue that holds everything together.

Most people think of Siem Reap as the gateway to Angkor Wat, the world's largest religious complex. Circuses don't generally come to mind, but the Phare Circus is the epicentre of edgy, alternative acrobatics, dancing, music and mime that catapult visitors into the everyday life and contemporary culture of Cambodians in ways that exploring temple ruins simply can't.

During the late 1970s and early 1980s, Cambodia was torn apart by the Khmer Rouge regime. Nearly 1 million citizens were forced to flee. In 1986, at a refugee camp along the Thai border, a French volunteer named Veronique Decrop taught drawing to the camp's children, many of whom were suffering from unimaginable trauma. These early drawing classes, which used art as a powerful way to heal, would soon plant the seeds for something extraordinary.

When the camp closed, Veronique and nine of her then-teenage students founded the Phare Ponleu Selpak or "Brightness of the Arts" school, which opened in 1994 in Battambang. What started as a creative way to process trauma is now a multi-purpose arts school providing free education and vocational arts training to 1200 at-risk young Cambodians every year, to equip them for successful careers to help lift their families out of poverty. It's also playing a key role in restoring Cambodia's arts and culture, which was almost destroyed under the Pol Pot regime.