This book offers a clear guide to Kathakali, exploring its origins, evolution, and characteristics, as well as its adaptations for a 21st-century audience. Kathakali is an introduction to this vibrant form of dance-drama, originating from Kerala in southwestern India, which combines poetry, music, rhythm, and dance to depict the stories of gods, demons, and humans. Emerging from the late 16th century, Kathakali captivates and includes artists from around the world. It significantly draws its stories from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, incorporating music, dance, grand makeup, and costumes to highlight the epic universe. This book illuminates how Kathakali combines relevant literary texts, performative conventions, and practices from local and pan-Indian contexts. Performers use their whole bodies—employing intricate dance movements, interpretative gestures, and highly developed facial expressions—as a means to depict, develop, and interpret action. Collecting the world of Kathakali, the grammar of performance, and the aesthetic theories that underpin it, this book examines its history as an ongoing process of change. The book seeks the characteristics of Kathakali, which is sometimes tightly structured with fixed conventions and other times fluid enough to incorporate fantastic developments. It assesses the cultural heritage of Kathakali and maps how the form has changed over the centuries. It also includes translations of excerpts from poems, plays, and performance manuscripts, as well as interviews with performers and cultural historians.