Jurij Batagelj

Overview

Jurij Batagelj - is a professional ballroom dancer, choreographer, director, screenwriter, teacher and former latin-american competitor.

Jurij started his competitive dance career in 1992. In 1997 he was already World Finalist in the youth category and in 2007 he made his first final in the British Amateur Latin Championships.

After winning the title of Slovenian National Champions he and his partner Jagoda Batagelj also won the title of World Cup Champions just a few months later and in 2010 they became European Champions. In 2011 they became UK Amateur Champions and they also won the title of British Open Amateur Latin Champions. After that they turned professional.

Professional Career

Soon after Jirij and Jagoda turned Proffesional they became Professional Latin Grand Finalists in all mayor competitions in the World. They retired from competitive dancing in 2015.

In 2006 Jurij graduated with honors from the Faculty of Sport and wrote his masters degree titled Usage of creative visualisation when training latin American and Ballroom competitors, which was later, in 2009, transformed into a study book for the faculty in cooperation with prof. dr. Meta Zagorc in the book titled Visualisation in dance and other relaxation techniques.

Theatre Show

In 2005 Jurij choreographed the first ever show that connected latin american dancing with ice-skating. He did it with then current ice-skating world champions Albena Denkova and Maxim Stavitsky in Bulgarian capital Sofia. After this amazing experience he wrote the script for “The 50s Show”, where he joined all the best dancers from Slovenia and created a theatre show that sold out every theatre in Slovenia and twice Narodni dom in Sofia that holds no less than 5000 spectators.

In 2017 Jurij recreated and updated the show and renamed it “Dance Amore” (danceamoreshow.com) and the show is currently very successfully running in Slovenia with plans to hit the foreign stages very soon.

n 2011 Jurij created another smaller but still successful theatre show called “A Dancer’s Heart – All or Nothing”, that was unfortunately staged only a few times since Jurij and Jagoda were more focused on their competitive career at the time …

Jurij has been passing on his knowledge onto younger generations all over the World since 2003. But his biggest passion is always learning something new, so he is a an eternal student but consequently also a great teacher.

Awards

In 2008 and 2009 Jurij and his partner Jagoda received an award for the dance couple of the year from the Slovenian National Federation. In 2009 they also received a prestigious award from the Olympic Committee In 2012, 2014 and 2015 Jurij and Jagoda received a golden plaque from the Slovenian Dance Federation for extraordinary competitive achievements.

Accomplishments

• Professional World Latin Finalist

Dance Partners

• Jagoda Batagelj

Entrepreneurship

• N, Organizer
• , Owner, Instructor