Creation.

TOURING

The following SZDT productions are currently available for tour.    

Most SZDT programs can be adapted to suit the needs and realities of all venues.   SZDT works closely with all interested parties to ensure the optimal performance opportunity is realized.

SZDT promotes community engagement opportunities and welcomes using local participants to perform in larger group production.  Also, visit our workshop and school program opportunities.

For more information, please call 416-450-4529.
Sama-e Rast
Sama-e Rast represents a mystical journey of man's spiritual ascent through mind and love to self-discovery in the dance style of Mugham.  Centuries ago, Mugham was an integrated practice that brought poetry, music, and dance together to represent seven unique psychological moods. Over the years, the connection between the poetry and music disappeared and the dance element deteriorated such that only traces of it exist today. In Sama-e Rast, walking on the vulnerable edge of emotions, Sashar Zarif, in an extraordinary collaboration with internationally acclaimed Alim Qasimov and his Ensemble. The piece passionately reintegrates dance back into the art form, the result of eight years of collaboration between these unparalleled artists to reincarnate this lost artistic practice.  Program includes presentation of 20 minute documentary film.
In The Letters of My Name
In The Letters of My Name was originally commissioned by Dance Ontario and was the winner of the 2006 Paula Citron Award at the Toronto International Dance Festival (formerly fFIDA), when she described; “The wellspring of the piece is the 38 letters of Zarif’s full name which constitutes six different names in three different languages – Arabic, Persian and his native Azerbaijani. In impulses of movement and text, we get impressionistic glimpses of a life turned upside down, of a young boy who survived revolution, war, and a refugee camp. Horrors are intimated, but never explained. The choreography, much of it based on real life physicality, swings between graphic emotion and whimsical surrealism. The dancer is rendered completely vulnerable, whether executing tiny baby steps, absurd in a grown man, or crying out in passionate outbursts that are almost embarrassing in their anguish. This is a work which opens up the guts of an artist and exposes the raw soul. It is dance storytelling at its best, because it raises more questions than it answers... "
Choreographies of Migration
Through this quartet of works, Zarif presents a very personal vernacular.  From a pastiche of languages, cultures and movement, he creates a unique contemporary style and a fresh way of communicating using traditional Central Asian, Near Eastern and Western dance forms.  Zarif's sense of displacement underlies Choreographies of Migration. Born into an immigrant family in Tehran, moving through India, Turkey, and other countries before arriving in Canada, he compels us to examine the various and often complicated relationships that inform ideas of home, identity and self. Each piece represents a different period of awareness and growth in his journey from Iran to Canada; each borrows from different stops in his physical and spiritual odyssey that saw him survive revolution, war and refugee camps.
Meeting with Saghi
Meeting with Saghi re-imagines and reconstructs aspects of lost classical Persian dance tradition by investigating an important part of that tradition, the mystical figure of Saghi, the wine-bearer, as she appears in classical Persian literature, music, art and calligraphy. Meeting with Saghi is a blend of ritualistic and traditional dance forms inspired by the mysterious Caucasus Mountains, the tall standing cypress trees of Shiraz, and the desert nomads of Central Asia. The choreography is distinctly stylized; melding eastern Sufi poetry, music and calligraphy.