This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Two troupes make a yakshagana performance possible, and neither can carry it alone. The himmela sits to one side, a lead vocalist called the bhagawatha and the musicians backing him, and it is the bhagawatha's sung verses that lay out each scene's outline, its characters, its setting and its central conflict, in the traditional ragas and rhythmic cycles, talas, the form has developed over centuries. The mummela, the dancers and actors, take that sung outline and build a scene from it in real time, in towering gilded headdresses and elaborate costume, through movement and through dialogue composed on the spot rather than read from any fixed text.
That improvisation is not a loosening of discipline but a discipline in its own right, closer to structured debate than to free invention: performers trained in yakshagana are expected to argue philosophical and moral points in character, sometimes at real length, without ever breaking the scene's logic or their character's voice, drawing on a deep familiarity with the Ramayana, the Mahabharata and the Bhagavata Purana that lets them extend a story convincingly in directions no single written version specifies. The result is a tradition where two performances of the same nominal story, staged on consecutive nights by different troupes, or even by the same troupe, can differ substantially in their dialogue while remaining recognizably the same tale, an approach to religious storytelling that treats the epic as a living argument to be renewed rather than a fixed text to be recited.