Stylized Drama

Sri Lanka's traditional performing arts - kolam masked drama, low-country and Kandyan dance, folk theatre - rely on visual stylisation as much as movement: exaggerated masks with fixed expressions, symbolic costume colour, and formalised gesture that an audience learns to read like a vocabulary.

For this lesson, a kolam mask is the clearest single example: each character type (a king, a demon, a comic villager) has a recognisable, repeated set of features, which is the same principle of stylisation covered in the Decorative Female Figures lesson, applied here to expressive rather than decorative ends.