Bulgarian Dancing
Tanya Dimitrov
Tanya Dimitrov is a professional dancer with over 20 years of experience, and a choreographer for 16 years. She graduated from the National School of Dance Arts in Sofia, Bulgaria, and Academy of Music Fine Art and Dance in Plovdiv, Bulgarian.
Tanya’s professional dance career started from Turkey, where she had the pleasure and honor to participate in several International professional dance companies with numerous tours and concerts. Tanya has performed in many other professional dance companies, including: Hurrem Sultan Dance Company, Magic You Ney Dance Company, Sultans of Anatolia; Sultans of the Dance, Akademus, Kolours of Turkey, Lake of Dreams, and Love Seasons. She has traveled and performed widely abroad, including in: China, Canada, Cyprus, Turkey, Czech Republic, the Netherlands, Finland, Switzerland, and Bulgaria.
After her return to Bulgaria in 2008, Tanya founded eleven dance groups, both for children and adults, and in 2016 she created the TDS DanceArt, Ltd. company. Since the end of 2016 she has made her home in Phoenix, AZ, where she founded Balkanik Dance, a dance group for Bulgarian folk dancing.
Tanya and her husband are the founders of the first Bulgarian folk festival “Tupan Bie” in Phoenix, AZ.
Macedonian/Balkan Dancing
Susan Reagel & Amy Mills
It’s about time these two taught a class!
Susan Reagel is not only one of the best and consistent dancers of the Portland area. She’s single-handedly responsible for ensuring Balkanalia’s survival when the EEFC released it from its cadre of camps. She created Balkan Festivals Northwest, and recruited a group of volunteers who manage the camp to this day.
Susan has been learning and performing all the Balkan dances since the 1990s. She taught the Reed College folkdance class for many years and was a performer and choreographer in the late Portland dance ensemble Naslada, and is the dancer who consistently remembers how all the dances that Ahmet taught 20 years ago go.
Amy Mills, a soul who simply cannot stay still when music is playing, has been involved in folk dance communities since she was a child. After growing up in a small town in northern New Mexico, she moved to the Pacific Northwest, where she earned degrees in anthropology, folklore, history and international studies. Between college and graduate school, she taught English in Dimitrovgrad, Bulgaria, and conducted ethnographic research in Transylvania on a Fulbright scholarship.
Over the years, Amy has studied a variety of traditional and social dances from across the Americas, Europe, Asia, and West Africa. She has always been determined to pass on her love for dancing in community, which has led her to start three different dance groups and teach a variety of styles from Balkan to Balfolk, rodeo swing to New Mexican bailes.
From 2016-2023, Amy worked for the National Council for the Traditional Arts (NCTA), designing and producing national folk festivals in five states and supporting partnerships with the National Endowment for the Arts and National Park Service. She has also served as programs manager at the Western Folklife, managing the National Cowboy Poetry Gatheringand other regional programs. Other roles have included Northwest Folklife program coordinator, cultural historian, documentary filmmaker, and project manager for a computer company.
Amy now works as the folklorist for the state of New Mexico.
Beginning Balkan Dancing
Jana Rickel
Jana Rickel is one of the foremost folk dance teachers and leaders in the Seattle area. We are so happy to have her share her vast knowledge and expertise at Balkanalia for the first time!
Jana discovered folk dancing as a teenager, in a class taught by Israeli instructor Yossi Sasson. She joined the Tulsa International Folk Dancers, and became their teaching director a year later.
In college, Jana taught folkdances from Eastern and Western Europe and Mexico in elementary school classroom workshops. In 1981, Jana spent four months dancing her way through Bulgaria, Romania, Turkey, and Yugoslavia. The next year, living in Germany, she continued to attend workshops in Bulgaria, Germany, and Yugoslavia and taught in Germany.
After returning to the United States, Jana danced with a performing group in Salt Lake City. When their band needed help in the rhythm section, she started playing bass and tâpan. Later, as director of the group, she took up other instruments and now, in addition to the bass and tâpan, plays tambura and various chord instruments.
Moving to Seattle, she taught weekly folk dance classes for the University of Washington’s Experimental college and the Greenlake Folkdancers. She also taught week-end workshops in Richland and Olympia, Washington; Victoria, British Columbia, and Tulsa and Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, as well as teaching at Northwest Folkdancer’s Seattle Festival for 10 years.
After a sabbatical to earn a Doctor of Veterinary Medicine degree at Oklahoma State University, Jana has returned to Seattle and teaches weekly classes for the Seattle Balkan Dancers. She also plays bass and sings with Orkestar RTW and Zakuska.