The K-Pop Dancer | Tsvetelina Nakova
Another day, another rehearsal.
Tsvetelina Nakova enters the large echoey hall and apologizes to her fellow dance team members for being slightly late. She enters the changing rooms with a smile on her face, drops the bag hanging from her right shoulder on the floor and takes out the dance clothes stuffed in there.
After she slips into the more comfortable attire, it’s time for a warm-up from head to toe. Dancers should always be warmed up before they start rehearsing in order to avoid injuries, especially when they’re starting a new choreography routine. And the new one appears to be Tsvetelina’s greatest challenge yet — her first female dance ever.
Tsvetelina Nakova is a 20-year-old student at New Bulgarian University in the capital of Sofia. What’s more, she’s a K-pop dancer.
The K-Pop culture is heavily based around choreography and performance, so as a result, there is a developing community of newly sprouting dance groups, which perform covers of popular songs and gain popularity online.
Tsvetelina is a proud member of two Bulgarian K-Pop cover groups, Noir Blanc and Cypher. Noir Blanc is a group she created with a few other passionate friends. Meanwhile, Cypher is a group with an already established reputation, for which she received an invitation to join after getting noticed for her dance skills.
Back in middle school is when it all started.
“I did karate for five years, but after having an accident, I couldn’t do any kind of physical activity whatsoever for over a year. I fell into a bit of a depression because I was aching to do something. Some of my friends were going to lessons for acrobatic rock and roll and I decided to join.”
How does one go from acrobatic rock and roll to K-Pop dance covers?
“Later, around ninth or tenth grade, I don’t remember when exactly, my friends showed me songs related to K-Pop. I fell in love with the dances themselves and with the idea that there are choreographies to learn for each individual song. That’s how I started liking the music, too.”
Whenever she dances, Tsvetelina says she feels free. This type of dancing gives her more liberty to experiment than anything else. The choreographies combine different styles of dance, no matter what the song is. The specific movements take inspiration from hip hop, contemporary, voguing, locking and many more.
“For me, it’s the ability to acquire diverse experience. Also, it’s just fun to get into character on stage. Whenever we do a dance cover, every person has to play a specific K-Pop idol from the group. And this idol’s role in the dance is your role. It’s fun to impersonate the people that you look up to so much and try to get in their skin.”
However, the process of choosing who’s going to dance which role can become pretty tedious. Especially when two or more people want the same role. That’s one thing Tsvetelina doesn’t like much when it comes to her hobby. “Sometimes, people take it too seriously. I just mostly step away since I don’t wanna argue,” she says.
In general, the negative aspect of dancing in a K-Pop cover group is how toxic the community can be. People are constantly compared to one another. Members of one group gossip behind another group’s back on many occasions, not to mention what conflicts arise when multiple groups decide to perform the same song.
The overly intense competitive environment in Bulgaria is too much for people like Tsvetelina, who are passionate about dancing as a hobby and nothing more.
“Very, very rarely it happens that you can do this professionally unless you decide to become a K-Pop dancing coach for a living, which is not the best profession you can consider doing.”
The community has grown a lot in the past few years, with many new young dancers aspiring to develop and learn.
“If I had to give advice to someone just starting out, they should know people like us can never reach the same perfection level of a real trained idol. They should go into it with that mindset and accept from the very beginning that this is just a fun hobby.”
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Georgi Petkov is a sophomore at the American University in Bulgaria, studying Journalism & Mass Communication as well as Film & Theater Studies. In his spare time, he listens to a lot of K-Pop music and is a big fan of their culture.
