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| Biography | |||||
| Bill
Bader has been teaching line dancing for more than 30 years. He started
line dancing in the early 1970's to disco line dances. Country western
line dancing lessons started in Vancouver in 1980 and Bill was in the very
first class. As a professional instructor and choreographer, line dancing
has taken him from coast to coast in North America, all over Australia, four
extensive tours of Britain, five trips to Singapore, plus special events in
Japan, New Zealand, Malaysia and South Africa. All organizations sponsoring top-level championships have invited him to teach and judge at their events. Bill has been Head Judge at many competitions, including helping organize the first Malaysian Championships, and South Africa's Battle Of The Boots 2002; plus Bill has taught and judged at such varied events as UCWDC's World Championships, the Australian National Championships, and CWDI's International Championship Events. One special event in Singapore set a Guinness world-record with 12,000 dancers performing Bill's dance "Singapore Swing". Besides "Singapore Swing", such popular line dances as "Boot Scootin' (Vancouver) Boogie", "Cowgirls Twist", "Ophelia", "Whirl-Y-Reel", and "All My Heart" have earned Bill's place among the best known line dance choreographers. In 1998 Bill received a Special Gold Medal at the Australian National Championships for contributions to Australian line dancing, and he was inducted into the Championship's "Bootscooters Hall of Fame". Before the Singapore world record, Australian line dancers set 6 consecutively-larger Guinness line dance world records using Bill's dance "Boot Scootin' Boogie" from 1996 through 2001. To watch a video of that Australian event in Tamworth, click here (wav file). Bill has been nominated twice for International Choreographer of the Year and for International Instructor of the Year.
Bill's choreography credits include music video and movie work. In Sting's "I'm So Happy I Can't Stop Cryin'" (1997) Bill and his students are the dancers and extras in the video; Bill created the line dance "Close Encounters" for the video. In the movie "Kevin of the North", Bill's dance "Boot Scootin' Boogie" is performed and Bill dances in the film. Bill has accepted invitations to choreograph line dances for singers Scooter Lee, Rick Tippe, Ronnie Beard, The Dean Brothers and Jeanette O'Keeffe. Other singers who have worked with Bill to include music for his dances on their albums include Dave Sheriff and Sean Kenny. As a dance coach, Bill helped his student Grant Gadbois win the Men's Overall Championship in the Advanced Division, sweeping first place in all four competition dances at the first CWDI International Championship Event in 1996, the largest line dance competition at that time. Bill has produced line dance instruction videos, teaching his own choreography, and these have proven to be very popular products. Bill is the director and founder of the Professional Association of Linedancers. Designed at the request of the Singapore government, P.A.L. was founded to provide a program of accreditation and upgrading skills for instructors and those who wish to develop into professional instructors. Bill hosted the very successful "Jamboree BC" line dance event in Vancouver for eight years, attracting over 350 dancers annually. Bill received the prestigious "Humanitarian Award" at the huge Vegas Dance Explosion in November, 2005 with voting by dancers from 16 different countries and mail-in ballots from even more. The award honors "the instructor who has had the most impact on the dance community through their talents, patience and overall compassion for their students." Bill no longer accepts invitations from big line dance events, preferring private parties and conventions. It is always a pleasure to introduce new people to line dancing. A major hobby is his web site, billbader.com, which is one of the most popular linedance web sites with over 3,300,000 page hits. The popular web page "Line-Links" is a major international resource for line dancing. This hobby led to part-time jobs designed and maintaining other web sites, Websites 2B. With line dancing no longer his main career, his main income comes from being the accounts manager for the stable of a prominent race horse owner. Bill was born in Pennsylvania but has lived in Vancouver, B.C. on the Pacific Coast of Canada since 1976. He has a master's degree in geography from the University of Michigan. He taught geography at UM (Ann Arbor), then the University of Louisville (Kentucky), and in the University of Hawaii system before moving to Canada.
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| Contact information: Email billbader@hotmail.com or telephone 604-684-2455. Evening calls are best |
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| © Copyright 2011 Bill Bader Material on this website is not in the public domain. | |||||||||
