Reframing sacredness: ritual reconfiguration in Xiangxi Miao Drum Dance and Balinese Legong Dance

This article examines the reconfiguration of ritual within traditional dance practices in the Global South through a comparative ethnographic study of the Xiangxi Miao Drum Dance in China and the Balinese Legong Dance in Indonesia. Drawing on multi-sited fieldwork conducted in Dehang and Pinglang Miao villages and in Ubud, Bali, the study analyzes how these sacred forms respond to the pressures of secularization, tourism development, and heritage institutionalization. Both dances are rooted in cosmological belief systems and embodied ritual practices, yet their contemporary trajectories diverge as they encounter distinct political, religious, and cultural infrastructures. Using the conceptual frameworks of restored behavior proposed by Schechner, the repertoire articulated by Taylor, and the discourse of intangible heritage, the analysis examines how ritual elements are preserved, reframed, or aestheticized through embodied gesture, choreographic adaptation, and institutional mediation. Rather than interpreting these transformations as cultural decline, the article argues that they represent ongoing processes of ritual translation and embodied negotiation. The study demonstrates that ritual transformation should be understood not as cultural decline but as a process of reconfiguration, sustained through embodied memory, performer agency, and context-specific negotiation. Through these processes, traditional dances continue to function as living sites of memory, affect, and agency, mediating between devotion and display within contemporary performance ecologies. Specifically, the Xiangxi Miao Drum Dance reconfigures sacredness through semiotic embedding within state-led heritage narratives, while the Balinese Legong does so through kinesthetic internalization that cultivates taksu.