Ankiya Nat is performed in village Namghars and Satra premises to preserve its traditional importance. This dance is a form of drama that originated in the year 1449 and it is still popular among the people in every region of Assam.

Basically, this is a single act drama, in which several characters get involved giving active role to only one of the performers. The Sutradhara of an Ankiya Nat, though not an active character of the play has an important role, since he recites slokas, sings, dances and explains every act of the play in prose. This dance is a classic mixture of music & words, which were interspersed by small dialogues and descriptive matter by a sutradhara for each time.

The participants perform this art form by wearing large masks of gods, goddesses, demons and animals. The masks used for plays are huge in size, sometimes reaching up to the waist of the performer. Some masks are even of size up to 15 feet in height, which give a huge look to the overall theater performance. Artists are required to give appropriate movement to their individual masks, since they have to enter inside a mask and take overall weight on their shoulders. The masks contain thin clothes in the front to enable the artists to see through them. Due to the heavy weight and almost immobile nature of these masks, the characters depicted by them are usually restricted to demons and snakes having very limited movements.

The dance performance starts with the performer`s entry with the beats of the drums from an archway of lights known as the agni-gad. Mostly, this agni-gad is kept at the opposite side of stage. This is a pre-dance act followed by the recitation of a verse by the narrator of the Nat. he does the recitation from the play praying to Lord Krishna, after that a song from the plays starts. The actual performance begins with Lord Krishna`s performance, which is a solo dance across the shrine, the main attraction of the drama. The narrator is constantly moving in and out of the stage explaining the play and making the whole events more exciting. The stories and the central idea of the play are generally taken from the life-stories of Lord Krishna.