Dhimsa is a communal folk dance of the tribal communities of the Eastern Ghats in northern Andhra Pradesh and adjoining Odisha, performed by groups including the Bagata, Valmiki, Poraja, Khond, Gadaba, Kondadora, Mukadora and Kotia. Dancers link arms or hold hands in a line or circle and move in a rhythmic step to percussion, and it is danced at festivals, weddings and community gatherings rather than as a stage performance for an audience. Because it is a chain dance requiring no fixed number of participants, it lends itself naturally to mass performance — which is what made a record attempt on this scale possible.

The setting is not incidental. The airport is named after Alluri Sitarama Raju, who led tribal resistance against colonial forest laws in these same Eastern Ghats districts, and the performers came from the agency areas his rebellion drew on. Staging a mass tribal dance at its inauguration ties the infrastructure project to that history deliberately. For the communities involved, Guinness recognition also functions as cultural documentation: folk forms that exist only in practice, without notation or institutional patronage, tend to thin out as younger people migrate for work, and public recognition is one of the few levers available to slow that.