Dance as destination infrastructure: Toward a progress agenda

Tourism destinations increasingly seek embodied, multisensory, and culturally meaningful experiences whose significance extends beyond immediate consumption. Yet tourism management still has a limited vocabulary for explaining how embodied cultural practices generate value across destination systems. This Progress paper uses dance as a focused and theoretically revealing case to address this gap. Rather than treating dance merely as entertainment, heritage representation, or event programming, we conceptualize it as relational, embodied cultural infrastructure through which patterned movement can organize encounters, carry cultural meaning across generations, and contribute to the character and capabilities of destinations. Drawing on tourism's anthropological lineage and interdisciplinary dance scholarship, we develop the Dance Ecosystem for Destinations—a seven-biome framework that distinguishes encounter-level value realization, portfolio-level accumulation and circulation, and cross-cutting technological mediation. The framework expands tourism management's conceptual and diagnostic capacity by linking these biomes to questions of experience design, stewardship, governance, value distribution, and evaluation.