In most religious theatre a performer represents a sacred figure: an actor plays Christ, a monk plays an angel, a villager stands in for the crucified. Ras Lila makes a stronger claim. The boy actors who take the roles of Krishna and Radha, called svarups, are held during the performance itself to actually become vehicles for the god and his consort rather than merely depict them, and the theology surrounding the tradition treats the distinction as real rather than poetic. Selected typically from Brahmin families and usually not yet past puberty, a svarup is dressed, crowned and made up with elaborate care before a performance, and once the transformation is complete devotees may prostrate themselves before the boy and make offerings exactly as they would before a temple image, an act of worship directed at the performer in the moment of performance rather than merely at the character he portrays.
The performance itself is staged nightly for much of the year in the temple courtyards and pilgrimage sites of Vrindavan and Mathura, led by a guru who narrates, sings and directs from just outside the performing circle, with musicians providing the classical accompaniment that scholars trace to the tradition's sixteenth and seventeenth century growth. A performance troupe, called a mandali, typically stages one episode from Krishna's life at Vrindavan on a given night rather than the whole story at once, so a devotee who attends across a season sees the fuller cycle only by returning again and again, itself treated as a form of devotional practice. The largest audiences gather for Krishna Janmashtami, Krishna's birthday, and during the spring festival of Holi, when the pilgrims following the Braj region's own circuit of sacred sites swell into the thousands.