Trot

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. 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.

Illustration inspired by a New Year dance troupe's props in Siem Reap.

Tradition details
Khmer name	របាំ ត្រុដិ ខ្មែរ
Also known as	Robam Trot; Trod dance; Trot
Practice type	Performing art
Usual occasion	Khmer New Year
Subjects	Dance & Theatre
Creator pages	Chheng Phon

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). The dance's full name comes from Trot Sangkran, a royal New Year ceremony.

The performance

Trot is a pantomime of a deer hunt, and like other sacred Cambodian dances it calls spirits into the human world. Two masked figures stalk and chase the deer, then kill it with wooden guns, in a traveling procession of more than a dozen characters. A troupe generally has about 16 performers, though the number varies. Wikipedia lists four main dancers (two women and two men), a deer standing for the forces of evil, a Dangdol who carries an instrument, four clowning Kanhche, two giants, two monsters, two drummers and a hunter. Other troupes play hunters, deer, giants, peacocks, banteng wild cattle and ghosts, wearing masks, deer horns, peacock feathers and long false nails.

The performers begin by praying to their teachers. As the music starts they scatter in all directions, moving to the drums. The deer dancer wears antlers and swings them, jumps, moves his head and sometimes runs around the circle. The hunter has banana trunks strapped to his waist. Leading characters often wear peacock-tail costumes and bright headdresses, and a black-nailed girl sings and sometimes clicks her nails. 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. 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.

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. Musicians add drums and two fiddles used in classical Khmer music, the tro ou and tro sau. Some players also hold the chong krong dombae and sing while the characters act out the words. 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.

Origin stories

Trot has two main origin tales, one royal and one Buddhist. 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. 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). Bun then made the dance to remember the hunt and honor the forest spirits, and a dance troupe went on to tell his story.

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. Wikipedia's version has Brahma, Indra and the devas kill the deer, cross the Anoma River and build a pagoda while festival music plays in the streets. This story is not found in the Jataka tales or the Paññāsa Jātaka, and it may be a retelling of the Syama Jataka, in which Syama is shot with an arrow.

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. 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. 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. 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. The royal language of the Siem Reap lyrics points to a court origin, and from the court of Angkor the dance spread through the country as a New Year rite.

The dance was once linked to Laotian mendicants who used it to beg for money, and more often to the Samre or Pear. French archaeologist Henri Marchal took it for a remnant of Indonesian origin. Today it is counted as a Khmer dance. 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.

French ethnologist Éveline Porée-Maspero noted that some Siem Reap villages had given up the procession by 1936. In the 1949 Siem Reap processions she recorded, 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. 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. 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. The monk Kru Ap warned that troupes that skipped this duty would not escape disaster in the new year.

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.

The Khmer Rouge wiped out the dance. Culture Minister Chheng Phon helped revive it afterward, and Trot is now a source of national pride.

Meaning

Trot is danced to clear away the past year's bad luck and welcome the new year. Henri Marchal read the royal dance as a rite to turn bad luck away from the king. A Trot done badly was thought to bring bad luck on the whole nation. The dance reflects an animist belief in good and evil, and many Khmer believe ancestral spirits take the form of deer or peacocks. 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.

Trot has also been danced for centuries as a prayer for rain in drought. The Khmer Traditional Dance Book notes it is sometimes performed as a rainmaking rite when no rain falls. In this reading a peacock tail stands for the sun, and people pray to it for rain on their fields. A 1949 report by Reverend Iv Tuot already counted Trot as a rain ceremony, and the paired, suggestive dancing may be a plea for fertility before the first rains.

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. Cambodians of Chinese descent often book troupes. 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. Urban Cambodians have taken it up, and troupes are a regular sight on Phnom Penh streets at New Year. 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. 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.

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. Sounds of Angkor notes that this Siem Reap version has no masked deer, a thinning of the older tradition. Trot is also counted among Cambodia's popular games and dances of the New Year holidays.

Khmer communities abroad use folk dances, Trot among them, to keep their identity in the countries where they have settled. 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.

References