Teaching little kids how to dance
If I haven't mentioned this little fact about me on the blog before, it's that I'm Bulgarian.
Bulgarian, and darn proud of it.
For the past 3 years or so, I've been organizing and leading a bulgarian folk dance ensemble named "Rozhen".
There are 11 ensemble performers, as well as a plethora of unofficial ensemble members who come to rehearsals or are involved in organization in some way. The little community that has been built up around this ensemble is so supportive and close, they feel like a second family.
Rozhen has performed at many different events, the most important being the Bulgarian Cultural Festivals held in Bensalem, PA (organized by the amazing people in the Bulgarian Cultural Center) .
Check out the BGCC's website at http://bulgarianculturalcenter.org/!
This year's festival (5th annual) will be on June 10th, beginning at 1 pm, with an entrance fee of $10.
Families and performers from states up and down the northeast - including New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, etc - come to this festival. Fantastic dance ensembles perform throughout the entire day, singers and musicians grace the stage to play/sing many traditional Bulgarian songs, and everyone has an amazing time.
Each folk dance ensemble focuses their costumes and sometimes their choreography on a specific ethnographic region of Bulgaria - Rozhen's is a mix between the ethnographic regions of Rozhen and Thrace.
Here are some photos of the different costumes and ensembles at previous years' festivals!
For this year's festival, Rozhen will be introducing a children's ensemble which will be performing Gankino horo (Gankino dance).
There are only four kids performing this year, but with luck that number will grow quickly!
Creating the children's ensemble is something that I've been wanting to do for a long time, so I was really excited to start working with the kids.
None of the children have danced before - age range spans from 7 to 12 - so to just throw them into choreographed numbers without prior training seemed like a bad idea. But I only had 4 weeks to get them performance-ready, so I had to improvise.
Despite not having any background in dance (nor much instinctual feel for rhythm), the kids are doing amazingly well! They learned the choreography in a mere 2 rehearsal days, are already feeling the rhythm, and are smoothing out their steps to flow more naturally. I'm extremely proud of the work they've done so far!
Today was the third rehearsal, during which we went over the choreo with the music and worked out the little kinks and misunderstandings happening in some of the combos.
Some footage from today - it was on snapchat so its very short.
We also tried on costumes, did measurements for hemming dresses and aprons, etc. Here's one of the little guys posing for us:
What makes me happiest about working with the little ones and teaching them folk dance is that they're excited about it - they run to get in line and start rehearsing, they look forward to getting together each week to dance, and they wear their costumes with pride.
There's nothing better than seeing them learning about their culture, taking part in keeping that culture alive and thriving, and having a blast while doing it.
All in all, I think this year's festival is going to be really great!
