Sandy SalAura
DRAG QUEEN · CHOREOGRAPHER · DANCER
DRAG QUEEN · CHOREOGRAPHER · DANCER · THEATRE ARTIST · MODEL
Seventeen years of performing arts.
Six of them in heels.
ABOUT
I don’t need to fake it. I am it.
I’m Sandy Mangwana. SalAura is who I become.
I’ve been a performing artist for over seventeen years, a trained dancer long before I was a drag queen. Modern dance in the core team at Sumeet Nagdev Dance Arts in Mumbai. Ballet, jazz, Latin American, kathak. More than a decade in the Bollywood industry, on shows like Jhalak Dikhhla Jaa, touring with A. R. Rahman, assisting choreographers and dancing freelance across the industry. I know what a production actually is: the green room, the costumes, the rehearsals, the music, the lights, the whole shabang.
That’s what I bring to drag. Most queens in India don’t come from performing arts; a lot of it is fake it till you make it, and I hope they make it. But my work is about the
talent being visible. Trained, rehearsed, deliberate.
I’m a brown, queer, Dalit artist from Mumbai. I live in Goa, where I’ve spent the last few years bringing drag into mainstream commercial spaces that had never had it before. And I work internationally.
THE TWO OF US
Yes, she’s a man.
I want you to know that. Not as a punchline. As the point.
Drag is an art form. It has nothing to do with sex, and everything to do with craft. There’s a man under the wig who paints his own face, designs and sews his own garments, choreographs his own numbers, and shaves off a beard and moustache he loves every single time he becomes her.
Sandy is the dancer, the designer, the stylist, the one at the sewing machine at 3am. SalAura is sensual, fierce, and a tease. You don’t get one without the other, and I’d like you to leave here carrying a piece of both.
Photograph: In Between Kings and Queens, Amsterdam
WHAT IT TAKES
Nothing about this is simple.
The hours in front of the mirror. The rehearsals nobody sees. The garments built by hand, one seam at a time. The cost of it, in money, in time, in what you give up.
I want people to understand how difficult this art form is, and how much of it is invisible by design. That’s what makes it worth protecting. Drag survives because there’s an audience for it. That’s the only reason it survives.
So come backstage with me. The behind the scenes is not the extra content. It’s the actual work.
THE REASON
Liberation
If I had to name in one word why SalAura exists, that’s it.
Drag found me at the lowest point of my life. I had lost my mother. My marriage had ended. I left Mumbai for Goa carrying all of it, and there were days I didn’t want to
be here at all.
What pulled me through was a question. I was reading Ikigai, and I started asking what it asks. What actually brings me joy? What am I good at? Can it sustain me? Does it change anything for anyone else?
Painting and makeup are the same instinct. I design and I style. I’ve danced my whole life and I could always walk in heels. And drag queens are the flag bearers of the queer community, which is a real responsibility, not a costume.
Every box was ticked. So: drag it is.
As a queer person I spent a long time without power. Different, so nothing I said stood. On stage, for the length of a number, I have influence over someone’s happiness.
People come in carrying whatever they’re carrying, and for that time they put it down. That’s the whole thing. That’s all the reason I need.
I share this because someone reading it might be where I was. There is a way through. Mine had heels on.
PERFORMANCES
BOLESQUE with Eve Fatale, Lalaland Festival, Amsterdam. Bollywood meets burlesque; two artists, two cultures.
Roots Festival, Amsterdam. Indian drag and burlesque, in collaboration with a local artist.
Taboo, Amsterdam.
Kitty Su, The LaLiT Mumbai. Christmas Eve, curated by Rage by DKloset.
Serendipity Arts Festival, Goa. A three-day performance in The Night Market of Stories: The Labour & Leisure Chronicles, curated by Preethi Athreya.
Het Nationale Theater, Amsterdam.
Lalaland Festival, Amsterdam.
Club Church, Amsterdam.
The Spotlight Monologues, Museum of Goa, in collaboration with Kalki Koechlin.
ALSO
Several hats, no particular order
Stylist, designer, creative director, makeup artist. I’ve worked in fashion on design, visual merchandising and retail spaces for labels, and styled for The Lil Flea and Blanc Magazine. I’ve appeared in campaigns for Vice, Black & White, and a range of furniture and clothing brands.
And voguing, which I felt in my body the first time I ever saw it, like it had been there all along.
Every look SalAura wears, I make or style myself.
BOOKINGS
Let’s make something
Available for festivals, hotel and venue programming, corporate and Pride events, brand activations and private events, in India and internationally.
I also choreograph and direct, and I teach Social and Latin dance. Classes are taught in person at a studio of your choosing, for groups, events or private sessions.
Full press kit and technical rider on request.
bookings@salaura.in