[2]: 155 Vasyl Avramenko was born on March 22, 1895, in Stebliv,[3] a townlet located on the Ros' river approximately 100 km south of Kyiv.

Orphaned at a young age, he was forced to wander homeless as an adolescent, until he eventually headed east, crossing the vast expanse of Imperial Russia towards Siberia, and reunited with his older brothers in Vladivostok, on the coast of the Sea of Japan.

This position allowed Avramenko to visit several major Asian ports as a crewman aboard Russian naval vessels; such worldly exposure encouraged in him a greater love of learning, and he returned to study with his brother whenever possible, eventually earning the qualifications to become a primary school teacher.

Here he was wounded and hospitalized, first in Minsk, then Petrograd, where he visited some of its theaters and became active in a troupe of military actors led by Yasha Vavrak, who grasped that Avramenko had a flair for the stage.

[2]: 10 In Kyiv, in the summer of 1917, Avramenko attended three of Vasyl Verkhovynets' rare and irregularly scheduled lectures on Ukrainian folk dance, its choreography and stage performance, including theory and practical demonstrations.

[4] By spring of 1919, Avramenko was for a short time in Stanyslaviv, a member of Yosyf Standnyk's theatre before joining Mykola Sadovsky's troupe.

[6] In the fight between the Bolshevik and White Russian Armies, Avramenko served in the Central Telegraph Administration of the Ukrainian People's Republic.

When UNR forces retreated west in 1919–20, he remained in Soviet occupied territory and worked with Ukrainian itinerant troupes of actors that continued to tour the region.

[2]: 16 Avramenko soon became so successful and popular that he set out on tour with a group of his students through Polish-ruled western Ukraine, often presenting demonstrations and workshops in the towns he visited, encouraging others to perform his dances and pass them on to still others.

The tour passed through Lviv several times between 1922 and 1924, while also visiting Rivne, Lutsk, Kremenets, Oleksandriia, Mezhirich, Chełm, Brest-Litovsk, Stryi, Stanyslaviv, Kolomyia, Przemyśl, Deliatyn, Ternopil, and Drohobych.

December 1925, Avramenko arrived in Canada in Halifax, as a man with a mission; it being his determination to tour North America with dancers, singers, and instrumentalists to bring attention to the Ukrainian people and their fight for independence.

[7] Avramenko decided to stay in Toronto, and opened his first dance school in North America in St. Mary's Roman Catholic hall, today the Factory Theatre building.

His troupe first performed, the year after his arrival, at the Canadian National Exhibition (CNE) August 30 through September 11 to grandstands filled with up to twenty-five thousand spectators.

When the dancers gave a special performance at the women's pavilion, Florence Randal Livesay spoke glowingly about Ukrainian folk dancing.

His troupe gave their first performance at the Canadian-Ukrainian Institute Prosvita hall at the corner of Pritchard and Arlington in Winnipeg's North-End.

[12] On June 16, 1928, Avramenko married one of his star dance pupils, Pauline Garbolinsky, from Winnipeg, and soon the couple was living in New York City.

[2]: 55 Paying dance instructors over widely dispersed areas across Canada and the United States, as well as for rental spaces for his schools, perpetuated his financial woes.

His second attempt was at the Metropolitan Opera, with 500 dancers, a chorus of 100 singers, and a folk orchestra, all dressed in Ukrainian costume.

[2]: 59  The New York Evening Post gave it a rave review, "…excited over the kaleidoscopic ardors of the dance, the richness of the chorus, the congeniality of the audience and the fairly inspiring naturalness of what really amounted to a brilliant Ukrainian folk festival.

Along the way to the west coast, he obtained loans and donations from Ukrainian immigrants in these far-flung communities, only aware of who he was through what they had read, unaware as yet of his inability to handle finances.

In 1935, his Baltimore pupils participated in the White House Easter Egg Roll and he claimed a victory for the Ukrainian cause and published postcards with photos of Eleanor Roosevelt at the event.

Having raised enough money, twenty-five thousand dollars, to begin production, fortuitously Edgar G. Ulmer, a real Hollywood film director appeared on the scene.

Ulmer had lost favour in Hollywood after running off with the wife of the nephew of Carl Laemmle Sr., who owned Universal Studios.

At this distance from New York, audiences had seen and loved his film Natalka Poltavka, but knew nothing about the questionable financial state in which it had left its shareholders, and Avramenko.

In the end, even the Ukrainian language newspaper Svoboda and he reconciled, as he lived out his old age in New York City, and whenever he entered their offices on his birthday, everyone would sing Mnohaya lita.