Drametse Ngacham

The Drametse Ngacham (meaning "mask dance of the drums from Drametse", nga means "drum" and cham means "mask dance") is a sacred dance performed in the village of Drametse in eastern Bhutan. It is performed twice a year during the Drametse festival, which occurs on the fifth and tenth months of the Bhutanese calendar. The festival is organized by the Ogyen Tegchok Namdroel Choeling Monastery to honor Padmasambhava, an 8th-century Buddhist master. A performance of the dance features sixteen masked male dancers and ten musicians. The dancers wear monastic robes and wooden masks with features of animals, both real and mythical. The musicians play "cymbals, trumpets and drums, including the bang nga, a large cylindrical drum, the lag nga, a small hand-held circular flat drum, and the nga chen, a drum beaten with a bent drumstick." They first perform a prayer dance in the soeldep cham, the main shrine, before appearing one by one in the courtyard of the monastery. The dance has two parts: a calm, contemplative part to represent the peaceful deities, and a rapid, athletic part for the wrathful ones. Performances of the dance have been conducted for almost five centuries. In the late nineteenth century, the dance started spreading to other parts of Bhutan.¶

The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Drametse Ngacham”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence.¶

Drametse Ngacham is The mask dance of the Drametse community is a sacred dance performed during the Drametse festival in honour of Padmasambhava, a Buddhist guru. Inscribed in 2008 on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, according to the structured record cited below. This entry was generated automatically from that record and has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition.¹¶

The source record links this tradition to 2 external registers, which can be verified through the citation.¹¶