Banafsheh Sayyad knows what it means to follow your passion. Growing up in Iran where her love of dance was discouraged, Sayyad did not allow social norms to hinder her pursuit of rhythmic movement.
“Dance in the Iranian culture has never had the opportunity to flourish. It’s always been considered something lowly and something cheap and not something someone with any kind of seriousness would devote themselves to,” Sayyad said.
However, Sayyad was serious about dance and taught herself to dance by following music and creating movements. Since she could not fully pursue her love of dance in Iran, Sayyad immigrated to the United States at the age of 15, where she began taking dance classes in flamenco.
“I started in flamenco and after then I just didn’t stop. I kept going,” Sayyad explained.
She didn’t stop. She kept going, through to the graduate program at UCLA, to the creation of her dance group NAMAH, to becoming a dance teacher and, now, about to complete a week-long residency at the Dance Center at Columbia College in Chicago.
But before she leaves Santa Monica, where she now resides and teaches dance, the dancer is giving a local performance this Sunday at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre.
The event, “Mirror,” features Sayyad along with her NAMAH dancers and accompanied by the percussion ensemble ZARBANG. The performance is in Sayyad’s unique style of dance which fuses Sufi, a traditionally male-dominated Persian dance form, with others that have influenced her.
“As much as I am very respectful and reverent to tradition, I’m not preserving a style that others have done,” Sayyad said. “I bring something new, mostly because my own experience has been one of having to leave my culture and to breathe something new into it and to fuse it with other cultures and in a way go beyond cultural boundaries.”
“Having to immigrate, you just don’t have the same expression as the people in the culture who didn’t have to leave,” she added.
One of the ways she fuses Persian tradition with more modern dance is through the use of the Persian alphabet.
“I’ve translated each letter in the alphabet into postures. Once these letters are put together, you have a sequence of movements, so usually I take either a word like “˜love’ or a stanza of poetry … and when you dance this out … it’s a movement that I didn’t direct, it just kind of emerged. I’m interested in that aspect of letting things unfold and not having too much direction,” explained Sayyad.
Sayyad hopes to provide some direction, however, to her audience members for “Mirror.”
“My aim in presenting work isn’t so much to impress people but to take them on a journey so that all together we move somewhere, somewhere into the inner-realm, into the unknown, into the mystery,” Sayyad said.
What she hopes people will find on that journey comes from a Sufi idea of the heart as a mirror.
“If we polish our heart … meaning our selfishness and our greed and our jealousy and our hatred ““ if we can see that they exist in us, we (can) let them release their hold on us, and our mirrors can become much more clear and therefore reflect essence, reflect the source, reflect the divine.”
Through exuberant whirling and meditative trance-inspired movement, Sayyad aims to inspire people to follow their passions as she did.
“Sufi is (about) the path of love and living one’s passion so my movement is that ““ my movement is very passionate and it’s very much about inviting everyone to live their passion and live from their heart and not be limited by dogma and cultural and religious views.”