Breakin' Convention, Sadler's Wells, London

Busting moves, killer steps

At the Breakin' Convention weekend, Sadler's Wells needs barriers for crowd control. This breakdance festival, curated by the British hip-hop pioneer Jonzi D, is a mixture of performances, workshops and film screenings. There are demonstrations in the foyer, with children trying out steps in corners. The theatre is packed with a young, passionate audience.

At the Breakin' Convention weekend, Sadler's Wells needs barriers for crowd control. This breakdance festival, curated by the British hip-hop pioneer Jonzi D, is a mixture of performances, workshops and film screenings. There are demonstrations in the foyer, with children trying out steps in corners. The theatre is packed with a young, passionate audience.

The performances range from political theatre to shiny group dances, all mixed up together on the main stage. The crowd is knowledgeable and partisan: ready to cheer visiting performers from France, Canada, the US and Korea, and roaring with pride for the young London groups.

The boundary between education project and performance is already happily blurred, with kids in some of the best shows. A group called the Holloway Boyz, teenagers from a London school, strut out with confidence, elbows squared and hips swinging. Yes, they're doing the virtuoso steps, backspins and handstands, but there's a sense of style in those swaggering walks, and some easy, fluent mooching.

This festival shows the range of staged hip hop. It's a street dance, so how does it adapt to the theatre? Many of these shows work in straight competition format. Dancers come on one by one, show off killer steps, then fall back into the crowd. It's the simplest form, the closest to street dancing, and still the most successful. The Hip Hop Collective, a group of British, French and American dancers, frame the show-off sequences with a group stomp. It's a short, bright, highly focused performance, danced with verve.

Making longer hip-hop dances is harder. The music supports those virtuoso moves, but it doesn't encourage more complex structures - even the solos tend to string brilliant steps together. There's little variety within numbers. When most of these groups want to change the mood of a dance, they switch records.

The Canadian RubberBand Dance Group takes that to extremes. Breakdance moves are stretched over classical music, making us sit through acres of Prokofiev or Vivaldi for a few thinly spaced steps. The audience, very sensibly, applauds the flash steps while drifting to the bar.

Another of the youth companies, Boy Blue Entertainment, gets the biggest cheers for its group work. Again, there are knock-out solos in a framing dance, but this time the corps is arranged in floor patterns, tightly regimented blocks or wedges. It's highly polished, but the glossy showbiz of those floor patterns is less satisfying than the brilliant, original individual work.

Then there's hip-hop dance theatre. British performers such as Benji Reid fit dancing into monologues, expressing concern about the violent commercial image of hip hop. The theatre loudly agrees with him, but the dance and the slogans are not fully integrated.

With all these new directions, Breakin' Convention has room for hip-hop history, too. The Electric Boogaloos were founded in 1975, inventing the rolling boogaloo and the snappy, jerking style called popping. The three dancers, draped in huge 1940s-style suits, twitch and wriggle through boneless combinations of steps. They are cheered by fans born decades after hip hop's invention, keeping it alive.