Hi Bellyrina! I'm Hilary, a member of Shakra.

We do have a workout dvd but that dvd is geared toward conditioning and training for our style of dance. The workshop we are teaching at Spirit will be different from our dvd because it will focus on the afro-industrial dance style itself and we will be teaching you a choreography. Doing the Industrial Strength Dance Workout does help since we do teach some dance combinations at the very end which can give you a head start in the workshop, but is not necessary to do this workshop.

The workshop will still make you sweat but they are TONS of fun to do and so is this workshop. Please feel free to contact me if you have any more questions!

If you haven't seen it, check out Shakra's performance on the "Gothic Belly Dance; Revelations" DVD. It always makes me think that if "A Clockwork Orange" had a gender swap it would look alot like them. It is a truly kick ass performance.

Sashar Zarif is a wonderful teacher, based in Toronto and director of his dance company, Sashar Zafif Dance Theatre. I believe he also still teaches at York University in Toronto, in the Master's in Dance program.


Here's an article that provides a good amount of background:
www.thestar.com/News/GTA/article/305740

Sashar Zarif, one of six Canadian immigrants to win the Star-sponsored 2008 New Pioneers Awards, is recipient of the Art Award.

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.

We recently had Elena Lentini in Ohio for a workshop and show. She's very much a fusion artist and incorporates lots of modern dance and other influences (she does lovely flamenco and salsa). I liked her. : )

Her workshop was loosely structured and not very physically strenuous- if you're a fan of drills and sweat, she might leave you wanting more. However, she has a very organic artistic approach and had us all trying things that (I think) we had never done before, and had lots of good things to say about using movement (and lack thereof) to convey emotion.

Her performance in the show was very sparse and dramatic- she spent much of the number wrapped in a *giant* veil. It was cool because it was so different from anything else on stage that night.

Elena just seemed like a really neat lady, she had some great stories of her life as a teacher and performer. I got the same feeling around her as I did around Princess Farhana; I wanted to buy her a drink and just listen to her talk!