Serhiy's road: from Kherson to world-level battles

Serhiy Banko, who teaches breaking and Dance Mix at IDC, has been dancing since he was 9 — but he did not start with breaking at all.

Films, YouTube and breaking with no teachers

Serhiy's first dance was folk and classical, from Year 4 at school. He came to breaking as a teenager, at 13 or 14, and not because he was looking for that style: what hooked him was cinema — the "Step Up" franchise — and Red Bull BC One battles, footage from as far back as 2005 that you could find on YouTube at the time.

In Kherson, where he lived then, breaking was barely developed. In the whole city there were two coaches who could give you anything: B-Boy Ukho (today a volunteer supporting the military and, Serhiy says, still training) and B-Boy Kharunzh. There were no regular sessions: "there was one training session a week, I flew to it, and I cried when it was cancelled."

Serhiy learned the core foundation — all of it, from A to Z — on his own, from the legendary B-Boy Storm's instructional video: three and a half hours of pure footwork fundamentals, plus freezes and backrock separately. "You could call me self-taught," Serhiy says, "but self-taught in the sense of having learned the entire foundation. And learned it properly."

When breaking took a back seat

At 15 Serhiy enrolled at college to study folk choreography — and for two years he essentially gave up breaking. Classical and folk dance became the priority: "I genuinely fell in love with classical choreography then. I even wanted to be a ballet dancer."

He came back to breaking as an adult, around 2019, when he had more free time. Serhiy does not romanticise that return: "It's not a nice story about how I lived and breathed breaking — I simply came back to it because there was nothing else to do." That was when it became clear this was no accident but the thing that stays with a person when all the other priorities recede.

Show ballets, theatre and the Dubai job that never happened

Alongside breaking, Serhiy worked a great deal in show ballets and commercial theatre. His best-known project is the show ballet "Foresight" in Kyiv, where he danced for about a year before the full-scale invasion.

There was also a project that never happened: a large-scale show with the Kazakh singer Dimash, prepared over a whole year — rehearsals, teaser shoots — which was to take place in Dubai. The war struck those plans out.

Today Serhiy works with the commercial theatre Shadow Strip, which he came to on a colleague's recommendation. He calls the theatre format special: "When you're acting on stage, even in a supporting part, the attention is still on you. In music videos and other projects it's on the artist, and you're the background."

How Serhiy ended up at IDC

In Kyiv, where he had moved, work as a choreographer was not happening: "I left my CV everywhere — nobody needs choreography, not even the theatres." At that point IDC's founder Kateryna Badikova wrote to him — directly, with a specific offer.

What stayed with Serhiy most was not the offer but the tone: "People talk to you as a professional, not like: come along, we'll have a look and see whether you suit us." He has taught at IDC since the summer of 2022 — breaking and Dance Mix, and earlier contemporary as well.

Today Serhiy has a TOP 10 finish in Ukraine at World of Dance (2024) and first place at All Stars Our Jam 2026 in Breaking Pro 18+ behind him. And ahead lies Red Bull BC One, the biggest breaking event in the world — the very thing that brought him to this dance in the first place.