Tradition

Trot

របាំ ត្រុដិ ខ្មែរ

Trot (ត្រុដិ, trot) is a Khmer New Year folk dance in which a troupe acts out a deer hunt to drive off the old year's bad luck.[1][2] Also called robam trot (របាំទ្រុត), it travels from house to house, or shop to shop, in the days around Cambodian New Year, with masked hunters, a deer, giants, peacocks and musicians.[3][4]

Name

The word trot comes from Sanskrit and marks the end of the old year as the new one begins. Sources give its meaning as "to cut off" (Wikipedia), "to conclude" (IntoCambodia, EAC News), "to end" (Tovnah Khmer Calendar) and "conclusion" of the harvest months (Living Cambodia).[1][2][4][5][6] The dance is described in the royal ceremony called Tras Sangkran.[7]

The performance

Dancers in colorful costumes, one in a gold sampot with arms outstretched, performing outdoors under bunting.
Trot dancers performing at Khmer New Year, 2019. Photo: Thyreach01, CC BY-SA 4.0

Trot is a traveling show in which two masked figures kill a deer, combined with a collection of offerings. The two hunters mime stalking the deer and are chased by it, then kill it with wooden guns.[3] Troupes play hunters, deer, giants, peacocks, banteng wild cattle and ghosts, wearing masks, deer horns, peacock feathers and long false nails.[4]

The performers begin by praying to their teachers. As the music starts they scatter in all directions, moving to the drums.[2] The deer dancer wears antlers and swings them, jumps, moves his head and sometimes runs around the circle.[2] The hunter has banana trunks strapped to his waist.[2] Leading characters often wear peacock-tail costumes and bright headdresses, and a black-nailed girl sings and sometimes clicks her nails.[2] A pair dressed as wild oxen play animals being hunted, and a black-faced forest figure crowned with flowers and leaves works spells to protect the hunters.[2] One performer dances as if fishing with a chhneang, a woven basket used to sift small fish from streams, and uses it to catch money thrown by the crowd.[1][3]

The dancer in front of the hunter carries a kangcha, a fork-topped pole about 2.5 meters (8.2 feet) long. A string ties its tips together and holds dried angkugn fruit with metal pieces inside, which rattle when the pole strikes the ground and set the beat.[2][5][8] Musicians add drums and two fiddles used in classical Khmer music, the tro ou and tro sau.[5][2] Some players also hold the chong krong dombae and sing while the characters act out the words.[4] A 2017 recording of a street troupe in central Siem Reap has singers, a pair of kancha, two skor daey drums, a two-string tro and three pairs of wooden krap clappers. The songs are in Khmer, with sound words that carry no meaning.[3]

Origin stories

Two kinds of tale are told of its origin, one about a hunter and a king and one with a Buddhist link.[2] In the royal tale, a poor hunter named Bun, who lived with his wife in Savchey district, could find no game and made an offering to the forest spirits. A golden deer with glittering fur and jewel-like antlers then appeared, and he killed it and gave its hide and antlers to the king.[5][2][4] The versions differ on details. His wife is Ubma (Tovnah) or Neang Oma (EAC News), the king is named King Brahma (Wikipedia), and the reward is a provincial governorship (Wikipedia, EAC News), the post of village chief (IntoCambodia) or district head (Tovnah).[1][2][5][4] Bun then made the dance to remember the hunt and honor the forest spirits, and a dance troupe went on to tell his story.[5][1]

In the Buddhist tale, the future Buddha, then a monk, finds his path blocked by an evil spirit in the form of a golden deer. He prays for help, and an angel comes as a hunter, kills the deer and goes with him on his way.[5][8]

History

Trot is widely believed to have begun among the Samre, who lived with the Khmer in ancient Suvarnabhumi before the first century CE and whose descendants live north of the Tonle Sap.[1][4] IntoCambodia and Tovnah place its birth on a mountainside near the Tonle Sap in Siem Reap Province. Living Cambodia names the hills near the Tonle Sap and the Surin region, now in Thailand.[2][5][6] In the Khmer-Mon era it was danced by the old Khmer, Por, Suoy, Samre and other Indigenous peoples in Surin, Battambang, Pursat, Sisaket and Siem Reap.[2] In ancient times the Samre visited the king every New Year to bless him, and during the Angkor era the king often called for the dance.[4][2][5]

It is a popular Cambodian folk dance,[9] and Sounds of Angkor describes it both as a "source dance" of Mon-Khmer origin and as a folk dance the Khmer adapted for the stage.[3] The archives of Dr. Michel Tranet treat dancers with curled sticks as the earliest sign of Trot. That curled instrument is shaped like a plowshare, with small bells or peacock feathers at the ends.[2]

In the 1949 Siem Reap processions recorded by the French ethnologist Éveline Porée-Maspero, a man played the deer by straddling a curved stick with antlers at one end and a grassy tail with a bell at the other. The deer's skull was sometimes covered with painted cardboard, with red and black Abrus precatorius seeds for eyes.[1][3] Some dancers wore rattan finger extensions tipped with red cotton pompoms, and one at Wat Athvea carried two dry-grass brooms. A collector held a curved pole with a cloth purse, and the band had four or five kancha players, a pei flute, a skor arak drum and two bearers of rattling sticks, sometimes with a two-string fiddle.[1][3] Siem Reap troupes danced before the Buddhas in the central shrine of Angkor Wat as an offering, went to the Southern Pagoda to be sprinkled with holy water, and ended at the Baray, where people picnicked on the last day of New Year.[1][3] The monk Kru Ap of the Southern Pagoda said that troupes that skipped this duty would not escape calamity.[3]

Battambang Province records show that the Cambodian International Play studied and performed Trot between 1955 and 1960, and it reached the international stage in those years. Peacocks and a spirit with long black nails were added later.[5][2]

Trot stopped being performed under the Khmer Rouge regime in 1975 and was revived after 1979.[9]

Meaning

Trot is danced to clear away the past year's bad luck and welcome the new year.[2] IntoCambodia describes it as marking the end of the year and wishing the king well for the next.[2] The dance reflects an animist belief in good and evil, and many Khmer believe ancestral spirits take the form of deer or peacocks.[2] Wild animals coming into a village were believed to bring bad luck. Villagers sprayed perfume on the animal figures, made them up, tied knots on them and prayed to them for good fortune, to ward off harm from animals in the future.[2][5]

Trot has also been danced for centuries as a prayer for rain in drought.[2] The Khmer Traditional Dance Book notes it is sometimes performed as a rainmaking rite when no rain falls.[4] In this reading a peacock tail stands for the sun, and people pray to it for rain on their fields.[5] In Siem Reap the dance is often called for in the dry season, in the belief that the deer is the evil spirit that holds back the rain, and that the hunt brings the rain.[7] Siyonn Sophearith of the Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts reads the deer's stiff horns as a sign of drought that the hunter kills. He says there is no evidence that the dance chases out bad luck.[10]

Today

Traditionally, Trot groups went begging from house to house. Now schools, pagodas, ministries, city halls and companies hire them around Khmer New Year to ward off evil spirits.[1][4] Cambodians of Chinese descent often book troupes.[10] The original form still seems to be danced by the Samre, Suoy and Por, and it is found mostly in Siem Reap and Battambang provinces.[3][5] Urban Cambodians have taken it up, and troupes are a regular sight on Phnom Penh streets at New Year.[6] On April 12 and 13, 2024, dancers visited Aquation Office Park, DIB Club, Pavilion and White Mansion in Phnom Penh, and Templation Angkor Resort in Siem Reap.[6] A few days before New Year, groups of women and men still go from house to house, calling up protective spirits for the year ahead.[11]

A stage version follows the deer legend and was choreographed by dance teacher Luong Sok Kam, who sings in it. In 2013 it closed the 37th session of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee, moved into the Sokha Hotel in Siem Reap after a storm ruled out the Terrace of the Elephants at Angkor Thom.[3] Sounds of Angkor notes that this Siem Reap version has no masked deer, a thinning of the older tradition.[3] Trot is also counted among Cambodia's popular games and dances of the New Year holidays.[8][12][13]

Khmer communities abroad use folk dances, Trot among them, to keep their identity in the countries where they have settled.[3] In 2006, a professor from the University of Phnom Penh taught Trot to dancers in Long Beach, California, for celebrations at El Dorado Park and the Cambodian New Year Parade on Anaheim Street.[5]

References

  1. ↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 Wikipedia, Trot dance
  2. ↑ 2.00 2.01 2.02 2.03 2.04 2.05 2.06 2.07 2.08 2.09 2.10 2.11 2.12 2.13 2.14 2.15 2.16 2.17 2.18 2.19 2.20 2.21 IntoCambodia, Robam Trot (Trot dance) (August 23, 2017)
  3. ↑ 3.00 3.01 3.02 3.03 3.04 3.05 3.06 3.07 3.08 3.09 3.10 3.11 3.12 Sounds of Angkor, Cambodge: danses folkloriques (in French, June 9, 2025)
  4. ↑ 4.00 4.01 4.02 4.03 4.04 4.05 4.06 4.07 4.08 4.09 EAC News, What is the history of the traditional Khmer Trot dance? (April 11, 2023)
  5. ↑ 5.00 5.01 5.02 5.03 5.04 5.05 5.06 5.07 5.08 5.09 5.10 5.11 5.12 5.13 Tovnah Khmer Calendar, The Trot dance
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 Living Cambodia, Dancing into Khmer New Year (2024)
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 AMS Khmer Civilization, Trodd Dance, from a text by Sam Sam-Ang (edited April 13, 2021)
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 8.2 Visit Angkor, Khmer New Year in Cambodia (April 13, 2024)
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 Cambodianess, Chhum Chantha and Phoung Vantha, The Tradition of the Trot Dance at Khmer New Year Is Fading Away, Some People Say (April 16, 2022)
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 The Phnom Penh Post, Kim Sarom, Khmer New Year brings out traditional dancers (April 10, 2023)
  11. ↑ Living Cambodia, Khmer New Year: angels and dances (March 8, 2021)
  12. ↑ Du Lịch Campuchia, Traditional games of the Khmer (in Vietnamese, November 23, 2022)
  13. ↑ The Phnom Penh Post, Cambodia moves to secure UNESCO recognition for Sangkran (February 17, 2026)
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This page was last edited on 9 October 2026, at 03:33.