An award-winning choreographer, Sandy Silva’s work draws from global percussive practices infusing themes with movement, vocal integration, theatre, and impeccable musicality. The result is a unique and powerful form of performance storytelling. Sandy has worked choreographically with gesture, song, and music, moving beyond traditional body percussion and expanding percussive dance vocabulary to create her own singular contemporary work. Sandy’s vocal compositions and body percussion subtly traverse disciplinary boundaries, drawing upon traditional Turkish Usul rhythms, African-American juba, Québécois gigue, Celtic mouth music, Andalusian palmas, and Hungarian legenyes. Through 35 years of dedicated study and deconstruction of these vocabularies, Silva’s vocalized choreographies integrate their rooted sounds and gestures to evoke fundamental themes and questions of humanity through culturally-specific corporeality: travel, journey, and migration. In Silva’s choreography, vocal melodies support abstracted narratives, resulting in a rich body of work that incorporates movement patterns, gestures, and sound to explore human questions polyrhythmically through singing, slapping, stepping, clapping, and snapping.