Petar Iliev is a Bulgarian choreographer and former soloist of the Filip Kutev National Folklore Ensemble. Petar has been living in the USA for over 20 years now. He organized the first dance workshop 8 years ago, in order to pass his experience and knowledge onto his young colleagues. Petar Iliev graduated from the National Dance Institute in New York. He worked in one of the first US dance companies Westwind International Folk Ensemble. Its task is to acquaint the American audience with the richness and diversity of the ethnic dance. Currently he teaches at the Pacific Northwest Ballet and the Chicago Ballet. The dance workshop consists of various music styles - classical Balanchine ballet, modern dancing, Bob Fosse Jazz, hip-hop, Character Dance, etc. All teachers of the workshop are people with great prestige in their field. This is the tenth edition of the dance workshop, because a summer dance academy has been held in the past two years, too. Mr Iliev teaches Character Dance, which invariably consists of elements of the Bulgarian folklore. 

“Recently, we moved to a new and beautiful studio”, Petar Iliev said for Radio Bulgaria. “We are expecting to welcome two teachers, who are to join us for the first time. I have been following the artistic work of Paula Weber for a very long time and I am looking forward to working together with her. She teaches classical ballet. Our joint work with Gary Abbott, who teaches modern dancing, will be also very interesting. Markus Galante will come to Bulgaria for the fifth time. He sets very high standards to his students. Markus also performed on Broadway. He took part in at least four original productions and has a good command of the style I like to call Broadway Jazz. This year a Bulgarian teacher is to join us for the first time - Nikolina Karageorgieva. She is among the first scholarship students of Iliev Dance Art foundation. She will teach ballet in the intermediate category. Andrea Burr is a professional hip-hop dancer. I would like to remind again that this style is not studied at a professional level in Bulgaria. My goal is to provide a series of opportunities to our talented children and young people, whose number amounts to 180 this year. We are grateful to the America for Bulgaria Foundation, which supported us in this undertaking. We have scholarship students each year and we send these people on training courses to the USA for an average of forty five days. Last year we granted five scholarships. This year the final show will be held at the University of Architecture, Civil Engineering and Geodesy on April 13. We have been making preparations for this event from day one. The event is worth seeing, because the young Bulgarian dancers show what they learn in seven days only. It would be great if it reaches as many people as possible.”

Petar Iliev also told us about the foreign participants at the workshop. They mainly come from Bulgaria's neighboring countries - Macedonia, Romania and Serbia. Young people from Germany and Turkey took part in previous editions, too. Students from the USA are also frequent guests of the event.

English version: Kostadin Atanasov