Drametse Ngacham

Sixteen drums

UNESCO's file describes it exactly. The dance features sixteen masked male dancers in bright costume and ten more men making the orchestra: cymbals, trumpets and drums — the bang nga, a large cylindrical drum, the lag nga, a small hand-held flat drum, and the nga chen, beaten with a bent stick. The dancers wear monastic robes and wooden masks with the features of animals, real and mythical. They pray first in the main shrine, then come out into the courtyard.

The dance is in two halves. One is calm and contemplative and represents the peaceful deities; the other is fast and athletic, and in it the dancers are the wrathful ones. Between them they are held to be the heroes and heroines of the celestial world, and that is the origin the tradition gives the dance: not composed, but seen.

One monastery

Drametse is a village in Drametse gewog, in the eastern part of Mongar district, on a ridge high above the road from Mongar to Trashigang. Its monastery is Ogyen Tegchok Namdroel Choeling, it is the seat in Bhutan of the Peling Sungtrul lineage, and the dance has been performed there for centuries. The festival that carries it is held twice a year, in the fifth and the tenth months of the Bhutanese calendar, in honour of Guru Rinpoche.

Why it is on this page without a date

The national tentative schedule that gives dates for forty-odd Bhutanese festivals does not include Drametse. It is a village monastery's own festival, announced locally, and no Gregorian date is published for it anywhere this site could check. Rather than invent one, we have left the date field empty and said so.

The dance itself is easier to find than the festival is. From one monastery in the east it has spread to most of the monastic and community tshechus in the country, and if you are at Paro or Thimphu it may well be on the programme.