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- February 25, 2008
Sashar Zarif
2008 New Pioneers Award Recipient
by Nicholas Keung
Immigration/Diversity Reporter
At
13, Sashar Zarif began his lonesome journey, fleeing the Iranian
revolution in the 1980s. Although he only finished Grade 8 and had
stopped school for four years while stranded in Turkey as a stateless
refugee, the young boy arrived Canada in 1988 smart enough to go
straight into Grade 12.
An honours student, Zarif studied systems design engineering at the
University of Waterloo for three years. But his path toward a
professional engineering career took a sharp turn after a 1993 trip to
Azerbaijan, where his ancestors came from.
He spent a year there studying the Azerbaijan national dance, language
and music. When he returned, he decided to write himself a contract,
"choosing dance as my profession and I will never regret it."It was at
Toronto's Eastern High School of Commerce, where Zarif first discovered
his passion for performing arts while participating in shows and
multicultural festivals.
"It gave me the feeling that this is home," recalled Zarif, now 38, who
has since immersed himself in different cultural dances and begun
teaching and performing with groups including the Azerbaijan Cultural
Association of Ontario.
After quitting engineering, Zarif went to York University to study dance
and finished a master's degree in dance and dance ethnology in 2004.
Zarif's own life experience as a migrant is often the subject of his
work, as in his upcoming show, Choreographies of Migration, at the
Harbourfront Centre in March. The idea for the dance came from the
300-some letters, some unsent, that he wrote in Persian to his mother
while alone in Turkey. In one of those letters, he appealed to God to
give him a friend that he could count on for "safety and security." "My
life has been a journey of migration, displacement and survival. I was
lucky that I had to go through this, so I could see more in life. It's a
hard experience, but it makes you appreciate life even more," said Zarif,
who teaches at York and is also pursuing a doctoral degree in world
dance with Middlesex University in England."Newcomers have to take the
time to become part of the texture of society," he added. "You don't
want to lose your identity, but you have to draw connections and
interact with Canadian society to make it part of your own space."
Zarif is the founder of the Sashar Zarif Dance Theatre and the Canadian
Academy of Azerbaijani Dance. In 2001, after the 9/11 terrorist attacks,
he started the annual Dancers for Peace, an international festival that
transcends barriers between nations, races and religions – and promotes
peace and harmony.
