The 50 or so dancers and 10 solo performers will dance 12 hours a day from 9am to 9pm until June 6, when the spectacle is due to take place. Everyday, when the evening creeps in, everyone empties the hall, and Bulgare private ensemble director and choreographer Hristo Dimitrov stays in the large air-conditioned rehearsal hall to do the choreography for the next day. If he cant tune in to dance immediately, he prays: Yesterday I stood in the hall for half an hour and I couldnt do anything, he said. So I fell down to my knees, and in five minutes it all started flowing. I was just explaining this now to someone. We sweated and jumped all over and were happy at what I invented. It will be just great, incredible.
He says that dance, to him, is something like an inevitability: I knew that when I became 33, Christ age, my life would change completely, and so it did. I created the ensemble because I couldnt not create it. I just cannot not do what I do. At 33, Dimitrov moved to Sofia to form Bulgare, and he has lived in the capital ever since. Bulgare has been around for about three and a half years, but is already being talked about throughout the country. It has staged about 200 performances worldwide and has filled the stage at The National Palace of Culture18 times.
When he leaves the rehearsal hall the evening you are reading this, it will most probably be almost 2-2.30am again, and he will have to be in there at 9am the next morning again, for the next 12-hours of near incessant dancing.
The pressure is super great, Dimitrov says, and they all know it. But before I decided on it, I spoke to composers, sound engineers, sponsors, everyone, and said: You know what June 6 means, right? No hunger, no thirst, no sleep, if thats what it takes . So they agreed.
Outside the hall, where the entrance is, a couple of men have spread out a table and are having lunch with rakia, while also rehearsing the Kazakh steps that a Russian choreographer is doing for the performance. Principally, Dimitrov does all the choreography by himself, but when there is something specific to be done, he hires outside choreographers. He did it for his first spectacle This is Bulgaria as well, when he asked a Blagoevgrad friend of his to do choreography and a solo dance for the Macedonian part of the spectacle (Blagoevgrad geographically belongs to the Macedonia region). This is Bulgaria featured what was best and most beautiful from the seven folklore regions of Bulgaria Macedonia, the Rhodope, Shopluka, northern Bulgaria, Dobrudja, Strandja and Thrace, and stunned the audience with its grandeur and scope. This year, Dimitrov is promising to make something even grander: They have never seen such a thing. I know it for sure. The upcoming spectacle will be a re-enactment of Bulgarian history through traditional dance that will involve theatre sketches, illusionist tricks, dancing, fighting, a multimedia screening, in short: something like an epic drama of a Wagnerian proportion. Epic stories are Dimitrovs love he says that he cannot watch a movie unless its a drama. Comedies dont change me. They put me in a good mood; I laugh, and in 15 minutes, Ive forgotten everything. They dont make me a better person. You have to suffer to become a better person.
As to tuning in to something grand and epic, you can trust Dimitrov to do that for you. Proof of this are his post-performance experiences: he has had 80-year old grandmothers come to him in tears at the end of performances, kiss his hands and make him feel very, very uncomfortable. Some have fainted, while others have thanked him for making them feel truly Bulgarian at last, and forever.
Dimitrov says one of the most exciting things for him, however, is seeing the ensembles name in crossword puzzles and having it as part of the questions in the Stani Bogat (Become Rich) quiz show on Nova TV.
For three and a half years, Dimitrov has managed to gather attention and love both at home and abroad. Part of the secret of his successes is that he is really very good at taking historical men and customs out of the depths of time and turning them into spectacles on the streets for This is Bulgaria, he unearthed Bulgarian actor Georgi Cherkelov from his two-year seclusion in the northern Bulgarian village of Uglen and made him act the role of a foreigner impressed with the 8th wonder of the world, as he calls it, Bulgarias folklore. While world music works in beats of 2/3rds, music in Bulgaria works in 7/8ths, 7/7ths, and so on, something that is true nowhere else in the world apart from neighbouring Greece, Macedonia, Albania and Turkey.
This is exactly the mystery. We have that music, but no one can understand why we have it. We can only suppose.
In April 2005, Dimitrov threw a multimedia spectacle presenting Bulgarian culture on the streets of Vienna, Brussels, and Budapest, to celebrate the signing of the EU accession treaty. The Europeans were very impressed and flocked to see the procession of dancing people dressed in 8th and 9th century clothes and traditional Bulgarian folk dress.
But then, part of his secret is that he knows some of the tricks of the trade in the second-floor music studio equipped with all that is necessary to compose for a modern-day Hollywood production, composer Ivan explains to us, somewhat tiredly but resignedly, that 61MhZ is the frequency that American psychologists have figured out acts weirdly on your stomach and makes you reel with epic emotion. This is the frequency that most music for epic films is done at. And, as Dimitrov says, film music is the only proper music produced nowadays.
As he sits ensconced in his chair he gives the impression he is someone who deals not with dance, but with business. That is not surprising for a man who, apart from directing and choreography his profession by education has done and does, advertising and publishing, production, screenwriting, the editing and publishing of the Bulgare magazine, and the overseeing of music production and costume design, and the building of the ensembles new 11-storey building in Lyulin, among other things. He has something like 28 professions. An employee of his put those down on a sheet of paper and thrust it on his desk just to spite me, as Dimitrov says. Ironically enough, the moment he starts speaking about the list of 28 professions, the person in question comes into Dimitrovs office, as if on a cue, and the two start laughing about it.
His office looks so cosy that for a moment I am duped into thinking that he lives here as well.
Behind him, one propped against the wall, one hung in a frame, are two guns the first one he uses to shoot at a butt outside the window for recreation, and the other, along with most of the rest of the things in the room, are decorations he received as presents at his 2005 wedding to Bulgarian folklore singer and soloist of the ensemble Albena. The wedding was no humble affair, and neither did it go unnoticed for his wedding, he unearthed 150-year-old Bulgarian wedding traditions that featured koukeri, a red cock, a cherry-wood cannon fired at intervals during the feast, horse-drawn carts, pehlivans (pehlivan comes from Turkish and means fighter. It is otherwise known as a traditional folkloe fight practiced in Bulgaria during Turkish rule), and more. He wanted to make things just as they were back then.
This meant no spoons, no forks, no whiskey. You eat on the ground with wooden spoons, knives; the barbecue rolls, the pipes play.
The interest in the wedding was so great that they decided to organise a folk festival from then on.
While he laughs and beams about everything and looks young, chubby, and good-natured, he also holds the reins of the whole ensemble and its some 100 people in a firm grip. Just before we go, it takes him five minutes to order all of his dancers in line, make the men rush upstairs and change their shoes from sandals to boots, and then perform the final scene of the spectacle for us.
When he leaves, he says a hurried goodbye and then disappears to his tasks. And we await the performance.
Bulgare will perform their new spectacle Bulgaria Through the Ages at The National Palace of Culture, Sofia on June 6. Tickets available from Bulgare, Tel: 950 4546; and The National Palace of Culture box office, Tel: 916 6369/ 916 63 38. For more information about the ensemble, go to: www.bulgare.net
