This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
A kathakali performer never speaks. Every line of dialogue and every shade of feeling a character undergoes is carried instead through twenty four codified hand gestures, mudras, combined with nine facial expressions, the navarasas, ranging from love and laughter to fury, disgust and peace, while vocalists positioned at the rear of the stage sing the actual text and a battery of drums, the maddalam, chenda and idakka, drives the rhythm the actor moves within. Training a performer to command this vocabulary fluently, so that a shift from wonder to rage reads clearly across an open-air courtyard, traditionally takes years of physical discipline at a kalari-based gurukula school, most famously the Kerala Kalamandalam, alongside training in the region's martial art, kalaripayattu, which shapes the dancer's footwork and balance.
The costume carries its own grammar. Green face paint marks a noble or divine character, red a villain, and a red beard specifically marks the most violent kind of antagonist; yellow is reserved for feminine and ascetic roles, and towering skirted costumes and elaborate headgear turn each performer into a figure visibly larger than an ordinary human, appropriate to stories drawn from the Ramayana, the Mahabharata and the Puranas. A performance historically ran through an entire night in a temple courtyard, staged as an offering to the deity rather than as ticketed entertainment, and an audience that knew the mudra vocabulary could follow a story's every twist without a single spoken word from the stage.