Artistic Director: Jonzi D.
A dance anthology that feels like a rock concert; this is not an everyday occurrence at Sadler’s Wells, but Breakin’ Convention 2023 is a 20th-anniversary party taking place across two days at the venue in an International Festival of Hip Hop Dance. With a host of special guest performances, up-and-coming artists as well as DJ sets, events and a few surprises, even for the Artistic Director Jonzi D., Sadler’s Wells has been transformed into a venue where the audience can dance too. Breakin’ Convention has been at the forefront of hip hop for two decades and this incredible event reveals just how influential it has been.
For its first night, the line-up includes ten separate performances arranged into two set blocks opening with the BC Youth Dance Company who present an introspective piece about leaders and followers, the movements all in the head and neck. Gully South Block also present the harder, more masculine side of hip hop with powerful shoulder moves and attitude, but this large company fills the stage with its underlying vulnerability, the variety of the form that this event is here to celebrate already clear.
And that couldn’t be better represented than in South Korean crew MOVER whose acrobatic form is the place where dance and clowning intersect. The boundaries are certainly tested in this part of the show with Threading Theater’s complex choreography of limbs stuck together but it is BBC Young Dancer winner Max Revell who delights with a Chaplin-esque solo piece filled with narrative and theatrical accomplishment, creating impressions of interior despair in a back-to-front suit and silent movie storytelling that fills the stage.
Concluding Act One, the superb Ghetto Funk Collective build on Revell’s approach with a jaunty piece that blends hip hop with jazz ballet infused with a 1970s vibe that resonates through the costumes and brassy soundtrack choice. The choreography perfectly accents the big sound while the pattern of solo and group segments borrows from musical theatre.
After an hour-long interval where food, workshops and additional performances are on offer, Act Two opens with French all-female troupe Company Nicolas Huchard who are infected by a pulse beat that travels through this powerful tribe across a 25-minute performance. It plays with shadow and light before making way for the brief but outstanding break dancing display of ILL-Abilities, a differently-abled dance duo whose muscularity and control in two solo pieces is phenomenal.
A show of this scale of course never runs to time, this one extending to four and a half hours, but the powerhouse company Boy Blue are worth the wait in a rousing penultimate performance of astonishing synchronicity, control and range. Taking a classic hip hop approach to the choreography, there are layers and waves that shape this electrifying performance giving it a depth, meaning and impact that is utterly gripping. You forget to breath when Boy Blue perform, a five-star effort just on its own.
Les Twins, Rubix and Missy are last up, facing a tired crowd but their individual performances, flexibility and speed are enough to keep the energy going till the end. Breakin’ Convention 2023 has certainly been a glorious festival of international hip hop that not only brings different styles of the dance together but with a whole second day of performance to come and an Academy Breakin’ Convention on the cards the roots of 20 more years of work are right here.
Runs until 30 April 2023
Breakin’ Convention embarks on a nationwide tour (17 May – 14 June); Breakin’ Convention presents The Ruggeds – State Shift at Sadler’s Wells (26 and 27 May)
The Reviews Hub Score
A glorious festival
