This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Chhau dance is not performed in a theater removed from its festival calendar; it is performed, most fully, at Chaitra Parva itself, on open ground called the akhada or asar, after dark, to the sound of reed pipes and several kinds of drum. Divorced from the festival, a Chhau performance is still recognizably the same dance form, still built from stylized combat footwork and animal movement staged to episodes from the Ramayana, the Mahabharata and the Puranas, but it loses the calendar context that gives those performances their occasion and their audience. Chaitra Parva is that occasion: the annual gathering at which regional performing troupes, transmitted within families and local performing communities across the Seraikella, Purulia and Mayurbhanj traditions, stage the year's performances together rather than separately.
The connection runs in both directions. Chaitra Parva without Chhau would still be a spring festival built around the Shiva and Shakti myth of the world's dancing into being; Chhau without Chaitra Parva would still be a distinct regional dance vocabulary fusing martial and agricultural movement. Staged together, the festival supplies Chhau's masked and unmasked performers their yearly occasion and their traditional venue, while Chhau supplies the festival its most visible public expression, the reason a visitor is likely to encounter Chaitra Parva at all. UNESCO's own inscription of Chhau on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2010 treats the festival and the dance as parts of one continuous tradition rather than as two separate customs that happen to share a calendar date.