Early Career
Demonstrating his characteristic zeal, Avramenko began his first "School of Ukrainian Dance and Ballet" on January 25, 1921, in a Polish internment camp near Kalisz for veterans of the defunct Ukrainian People's Republic. He began with 100 students (everyone from the guards to small children), teaching them the basic steps of Ukrainian dance, eventually teaching whole dances, and finally putting on a celebrated performance on May 24 of that year.
Avramenko soon became so successful and popular that he set out on tour with a group of his students through present-day western Ukraine, often presenting demonstrations and workshops in the towns he visited, encouraging others to perform his dances and pass them on to others. The tour passed through Lviv several times between 1922 and 1924, while also visiting Rivne, Lutsk, Kremianets, Oleksandriia, Mezhirich, Kholm, Brest-Litovsk, Stryi, Stanyslaviv, Kolomyia, Przemyśl, Deliatyn, Ternopil, and Drohobych in that time.
Eventually, for reasons as yet unknown, Avramenko would turn away from his Ukrainian homeland, and set out to visit Ukrainian enclaves in the rest of Poland, and further off to Podebrady and Prague in Czechoslovakia as well as Delmenhorst in Germany. In 1925, with the help of Captain John S. Atkinson, then the director of the Canadian Bureau for the Advancement of Music, Vasyl Avramenko, the patriot of the former Ukrainian People's Republic and therefore a "man without a country", was nonetheless granted permission to enter Canada.
The movie Natalka Poltavka, directed by Vasyl Avramenko, was released on February 14, 1937 in the United States. This was the first Ukrainian language film produced in the United States.
Read more about this topic: Vasyl Avramenko
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