Purawai Vyas
Curator
Purawai Vyas is a Toronto-based dance artist, choreographer, and cultural producer whose work is rooted in Bharatanatyam and South Asian dance. Her creative practice weaves together classical and folk vocabulary, ritual practice, and contemporary movement to explore diasporic identity, spirituality and transformation.
Through choreography, performance, and community-based initiatives, Purawai nurtures dialogue between tradition and innovation, reimagining South Asian dance forms as a living, evolving language of embodied storytelling. Purawai invites audiences to experience South Asian dance as both a site of cultural memory and a dynamic form of contemporary artistic expression, uniting the greater community.
Curatorial Statement
RangaMandal is a participatory/community-based dance and visual art project rooted in the Gujarati folk dance of Garba. Over nine nights, artists and community members dance in circles upon a large canvas, their paint-dipped footsteps leaving traces of rhythm, devotion, and colour. As layers of movement accumulate, a mandala emerges—a collective artwork born from shared motion and intention.
Rangamandal reimagines ritual as contemporary art, celebrating spirituality, repetition, and belonging through embodied collaboration. It invites all participants, regardless of background, to move together in joy and reverence, transforming community gathering into a living, breathing act of creation.