Sandra Shih Parks’s work brings together choreography, live music, cultural research, documentary filmmaking, education, and emerging technology. Each project explores how movement can connect disciplines, illuminate cultural histories, invite participation, and create new possibilities for learning and artistic exchange.
INTERACTIVE PERFORMANCE & INTERDISCIPLINARY COLLABORATION
Romeo and Juliet—The Choice
Romeo and Juliet—The Choice combines original choreography with Prokofiev’s rarely performed solo-piano score, digital media, and perspectives from history, literature, music, and theatre. After considering different interpretations of the story, audience members vote to determine which of its two possible endings the performers will present.
World Premiere: Philadelphia, 2018
Additional Performances: Fairfield, 2022 · Denver, 2025
Created by: Sandra Shih Parks and pianist Frederic Chiu
About the Project
Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet tells the story of two young lovers from feuding families whose lives end tragically. When Sergei Prokofiev began composing his ballet in the 1930s, he developed an alternative ending in which Juliet awakens before Romeo takes his own life. This version was never included in the final orchestral score, which returned to Shakespeare’s familiar tragic conclusion.
Romeo and Juliet—The Choice invites audiences to consider how and why stories change across time, culture, and artistic form. Performed live to Prokofiev’s rarely heard solo-piano score, the production brings together original choreography, music, theatre, literature, history, audience participation, and digital media.
Before the performance, artists and scholars from multiple disciplines share their interpretations of the story and discuss the artistic and historical questions surrounding its two possible conclusions. Audience members then vote for the ending they wish to experience. The result is revealed only as the performance unfolds, making each presentation a shared act of interpretation and choice.
INTERACTIVE PERFORMANCE & INTERDISCIPLINARY COLLABORATION
The Nutcracker: A Journey Through Cultures
The Nutcracker: A Journey Through Cultures combines classical ballet with cultural research, collaborative choreography, and perspectives from artists connected to the traditions represented. By reimagining the Spanish, Arabian, and Chinese variations, the project replaces inherited stereotypes with movement grounded in cultural context, respect, and artistic integrity.
Premiere: Denver, 2024
Presented by: Colorado Conservatory of Dance
Directed by: Sandra Shih Parks
About the Project
The Nutcracker: A Journey Through Cultures reimagines the culturally themed variations in Act II of the classical ballet through research, dialogue, and collaboration with artists connected to the traditions being represented.
Although The Nutcracker is beloved by audiences around the world, many productions continue to present Spanish, Arabian, and Chinese dances through exaggerated gestures, costumes, and stereotypes inherited from nineteenth-century European ideas about other cultures. This project asks how these familiar scenes can be approached with greater cultural understanding while preserving the music, theatricality, and magic of the ballet.
Each variation was developed through a distinct collaborative process. Fiesta Colorado contributed knowledge of traditional Spanish dance; Donna Mejia brought her expertise in Arabic cultural dance and contemporary movement; and Sandra Shih Parks drew upon her Taiwanese heritage and research in Chinese folk dance to create the Chinese variation.
Rather than treating culture as decoration, the production centers cultural knowledge as part of the creative process. Movement, music, costume, and context work together to honor the individuality of each tradition while inviting dancers and audiences to experience The Nutcracker through a more thoughtful and globally connected lens.
The project reflects Sandra’s ongoing commitment to culturally responsive practice and her belief that classical works can evolve through research, collaboration, and respectful exchange.
DOCUMENTARY RESEARCH & CULTURAL INQUIRY
Dance Across Cultures
Through documentary filmmaking and field research, Dance Across Cultures explores how movement carries cultural memory, connects communities, and reveals relationships across geography and history. Beginning with ethnic-minority dance traditions in China and expanding to Taiwanese Indigenous and Austronesian cultures, the project centers cultural knowledge, dialogue, and lived experience.
Format: Documentary film and field research
Focus: Dance, cultural memory, identity, and connection
Created and directed by: Sandra Shih Parks
About the Project
Dance Across Cultures is an ongoing documentary and research initiative exploring how dance carries cultural memory, connects communities, and reveals relationships across geography and history. Through field research, interviews, movement documentation, and collaboration with culture bearers, Sandra examines dance as both an artistic practice and a living record of identity, migration, tradition, and social change.
The research began with a documentary focused on dance traditions among ethnic-minority communities in China. It later expanded to Taiwanese Indigenous communities and the broader cultural connections among Austronesian peoples across the Pacific.
At the center of the project is a question: How can dance reveal connections among cultures while honoring the distinct histories and lived experiences of each community?
The developing research considers relationships among Taiwanese Indigenous peoples and other Austronesian-speaking communities, including communities in the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Polynesia. Rather than treating dance as an isolated performance form, the project considers its connections to music, visual art, language, ceremony, environment, and cultural preservation.
Sandra’s process is grounded in listening, observation, documentation, and relationship-building. By engaging directly with artists, elders, educators, and community members, she seeks to understand how movement knowledge is carried and shared across generations.
The project does not present different cultures as interchangeable. Instead, it explores possible connections while respecting the identity, history, and cultural authority of each participating community.
Future phases will bring together documentary film, dance, music, visual art, oral history, and scholarly inquiry. The long-term vision is to create an interdisciplinary cultural bridge that encourages dialogue, supports cultural preservation, and helps audiences understand how movement connects people across the Pacific.
DANCE EDUCATION & DIGITAL INNOVATION
3D Ballet Curriculum
The 3D Ballet Curriculum combines dance pedagogy, motion capture, animation, and digital technology to translate three-dimensional movement for virtual learning. Developed through collaboration between dance and animation faculty, the project offers students new ways to study ballet technique, spatial awareness, alignment, and movement dynamics from multiple perspectives.
Format: Digital curriculum and 3D movement model
Focus: Ballet pedagogy, visualization, and virtual learning
Developed at: Drexel University
The 3D Ballet Curriculum is an interdisciplinary educational initiative combining ballet pedagogy, motion capture, animation, and digital technology. Developed during the COVID-19 pandemic, the project responded to a fundamental challenge: how can educators teach a three-dimensional movement form through a two-dimensional virtual platform?
Sandra collaborated with faculty in Animation and Visual Effects at Drexel University to explore how a digital ballet model could help students see and understand movement from perspectives unavailable in a traditional video demonstration.
Ballet requires students to understand alignment, weight transfer, coordination, spatial pathways, and the relationships among different parts of the body. In a conventional video, students generally observe movement from a single fixed viewpoint. A three-dimensional model can be rotated and viewed from the front, side, back, or above, allowing students to examine movement in greater detail.
The project was designed to support—not replace—the knowledge and personal guidance of a dance educator. Its purpose is to give teachers another visual tool for explaining complex movement and to offer students additional ways to study technique.
The curriculum brought together knowledge from dance education, motion capture, character animation, and digital modeling. Ballet movements were recorded and translated into animated three-dimensional demonstrations that could be examined from multiple angles.
This collaboration also required artists and technologists to develop a shared language. Ballet terminology and embodied knowledge had to be translated into information that animators and digital systems could interpret without losing the movement’s artistic and technical intention.
Beyond remote instruction, the model has potential applications in live classrooms, teacher training, movement analysis, anatomical study, and personalized feedback. Future development could make ballet education more interactive and accessible while opening new conversations about how embodied art forms can be taught through emerging technologies.
Additional Selected Work
Sandra’s broader body of work spans concert dance, dance film, interdisciplinary collaboration, cultural inquiry, and educational performance. These selected works reflect her continuing interest in history, identity, music, and the power of movement to create dialogue.
LIVE MUSIC & CHOREOGRAPHY
Lost Generations: A Prokofiev Project
Set to three works by Sergei Prokofiev, Lost Generations traces artists from the avant-garde culture of 1920s Paris to the restrictions of the 1940s Soviet Union. Through live music and choreography, the work examines creativity as reflection, resistance, and a means of survival during political upheaval.
DANCE FILM
Invisible
Inspired by the women musicians of Venice’s Ospedale della Pietà, Invisible explores visibility, legacy, and artistic lives shaped behind a literal barrier. Originally created as a dance film at Drexel University, the film was invited to the 2023 Florence Biennale. The work was subsequently reimagined for live performance.
PERFORMANCE ARCHIVE
Selected Choreography
Explore works spanning concert dance, dance film, cultural storytelling, and interdisciplinary collaboration. This evolving archive brings together performance information, video excerpts, creative context, and choreography presented across the United States and internationally over more than two decades.
Selected Recognition & Press
- Invisible — invited to the 2025 Florence Biennale
- Fo(u)r Women — presented at the 2018 Beijing Dance Festival and 2019 Palm Springs Dance Festival
- Us – presented at the 2016 Beijing Dance Festival and 2017 The Series New York City
- Journey to Congo Square — selected for an American College Dance Association Gala
- Rebuild – selected for an American College Dance Association Gala