Bhutan - The Mask Dance of the Drums from Drametse

Traditional mask dancer at a Bhutanese festival.

Sent by Ben, a TravBuddy friend from Bhutan.

The Drametse Ngacham (Mask Dance) of the Drametse community is a sacred cultural and religious mask dance performed during the Drametse Festival in honour of Padmasambhava, a Buddhist guru. It takes place twice a year, during the fifth month and the tenth month of the Bhutanese calendar. The festival is held by the Ogyen Tegchok Namdroel Choeling Monastery, situated in the Mongar district of eastern Bhutan. The dance features sixteen masked male dancers wearing colorful costumes and ten other men comprising the orchestra lead by a cymbal player. The dance has a calm and contemplative part that represents the peaceful deities and a rapid and athletic part, where the dancers represent wrathful deities.

Dancers dressed in monastic robes and wearing wooden masks with features of real and mythical animals perform a prayer dance in the soeldep cham, the main shrine, before appearing one by one on the main courtyard. The dance performance is accompanied by traditional instruments, which are played by an orchestra and by the dancers themselves. The orchestra consists of 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 bended drumstick.

The Drametse Ngacham has been performed in this location for centuries. The form has both religious and cultural significance, because it is believed to have originally been performed by the heroes and heroines of the celestial world. In the 19th century, versions of the Drametse Ngacham were introduced in other parts of Bhutan. For the audience, the dance is a source of spiritual empowerment and is attended by people from Drametse as well as neighbouring villages and districts to obtain blessings.  Today, the dance has evolved from a local event centered around a particular community into something approaching a national art form, representing the identity of the Bhutanese nation as a whole.

Although the dance is highly appreciated among all generations, the number of practitioners is dwindling due to the lack of rehearsal time, the absence of a systematic mechanism to train and honour the dancers and musicians and the gradual decrease in interest among young people. At present, there are only a handful of expert practitioners with comprehensive knowledge about the traditional features of the dance. Moreover, the spreading of the dance to other parts of the country inevitably leads to its distortion. (Source)

Bhutan

Amankhora, view from inside

Sent by Ben, a TravBuddy friend from Bhutan.

Bhutan, officially the Kingdom of Bhutan, is a landlockedstate in South Asia located at the eastern end of the Himalayas. It is bordered to the north by China and to the south, east and west by the Republic of India. Further west, it is separated from Nepal by the Indian state of Sikkim, while further south it is separated fromBangladesh by the Indian states of Assam and West Bengal. Bhutan's capital and largest city is Thimphu.

Bhutan existed as a patchwork of minor warring fiefdoms until the early 17th century, when the lama and military leader ShabdrungNgawang Namgyal, fleeing religious persecution in Tibet, unified the area and cultivated a distinct Bhutanese identity. Later, in the early 20th century, Bhutan came into contact with the British Empire and retained strong bilateral relations with India upon its independence. In 2006, based on a global survey, Business Week rated Bhutan the happiest country in Asia and the eighth-happiest in the world.

Bhutan's landscape ranges from subtropical plains in the south to the sub-alpine Himalayan heights in the north, where some peaks exceed 7,000 metres (23,000 ft). Its total area was reported as approximately 46,500 km² (18,000 sq mi) in 1997 and 38,394 square kilometres (14,824 sq mi) in 2002. Bhutan's state religion is Vajrayana Buddhism and the population, now (as of 2012/2013) estimated to be nearly three-quarters of a million, is predominantly Buddhist. Hinduism is the second-largest religion.

In 2008, Bhutan made the transition from absolute monarchy to constitutional monarchy and held its first general election. As well as being a member of the United Nations, Bhutan is a member of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) and hosted SAARC's sixteenth summit in April 2010.