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 Mudiyettu performance begins before a single dancer has taken the stage. Priests and specialist artists first draw a kalam, a large image of the goddess Bhadrakali, directly onto the temple floor using coloured powders ground from rice, turmeric, charcoal and other natural pigments, a practice found in several Kerala ritual arts but nowhere staged quite the way Mudiyettu stages it, as the visible starting point of the drama that follows. Only after the kalam is complete and ritually worshipped does the enactment begin: dancers, drummers and vocalists together perform the battle between the goddess and the demon Darika before an audience that is, in the fullest sense, the whole village, since Mudiyettu is staged in Bhadrakali temples along the Chalakkudy Puzha, Periyar and Moovattupuzha rivers with the participation of the surrounding community rather than of a touring professional troupe.
That community role extends to how the art form is taught. A complete production needs roughly sixteen participants, drummers, kalam artists, vocalists and dancers among them, and a performer traditionally learns a role by watching and assisting through repeated annual seasons rather than through formal separate instruction, so that Mudiyettu's survival depends less on any single teaching institution than on a village continuing, year after year, to stage its own goddess's myth for itself.