He Was Discovered Dancing in a Grocery Store

Choreography by Kida The Great

Artist: Drake & 21 Savage - On BS

Location: The Manor LDN Dance Studio, Finsbury Park, North London

Every great career needs a first break, and Kida the Great's came somewhere nobody would expect one: a grocery store. Spotted dancing in the aisles as a child, Kida and his family were offered something rare — free classes at a local studio, on the condition his mother, a skilled dancer herself, helped out around the space in exchange. It's the kind of unlikely beginning that makes everything that followed feel even more remarkable.

That talent moved fast. Kida joined his first hip-hop crew at just six years old, dancing alongside teammates nearly three times his age. By eleven, he'd appeared in Kendrick Lamar's politically charged, critically acclaimed video for "Alright." Music video work with Chris Brown followed shortly after, and by thirteen, Kida was already making a name for himself on Sacramento's battle scene — going head to head with dance legends including Les Twins while still years away from adulthood.

Rather than settle into the hip-hop lane that had carried him so far, Kida made a deliberate choice to step outside it. He's spoken about how staying purely in hip-hop, the style he loved most, would have limited how far he could actually take his career — pushing himself to grow into styles well beyond his comfort zone became the real turning point. That decision meant training up to eight hours a day across disciplines as different as African Jazz and Ballroom, working through injuries, and at one especially demanding point, performing while hooked up to an IV just to get through a routine.

The payoff came in 2013, when Kida won So You Think You Can Dance — a milestone he's described as one of the most overwhelming, rollercoaster moments of his life, the point where he truly understood he belonged among the show's legendary winners. Bringing that same relentless, boundary-pushing energy into The Manor LDN meant London dancers trained with someone who's turned an against-the-odds beginning into a genuinely legendary career, one deliberate risk at a time.