Creators: Compagnia Bellanda, Emma Houston, Joseph Toonga, Kaner Scott and Rock Force Crew
Usually, Breakin’ Convention’s annual takeover of Sadler’s Wells is the biggest party of the year, but this ‘Friction’ focused programme for 2026 feels unusually lacklustre. The acts are fine if not energised, the auditorium hasn’t sold out for its weekend launch event, the mosh pit is more than half empty and older members of the audience openly have loud and lengthy chats during the performances; someone is even playing chess on their phone. Regular host and co-founder Jonzi D is doing his best to manufacture some atmosphere, but this year, no one is really feeling it on or off stage.
The Act One programme is eclectic as ever, with two longer and one short piece drawn from an international bank of collaborators, but the mood and emotional shape is certainly downbeat for the most part. It opens with Emma Houston representing the UK in a multi-genre piece put together in two weeks and selected specially for Breakin’ Convention, combining dance, live music performance with a pedal loop and stand-up comedy. Houston’s style is big rolling shapes propelled by constant forces across chairs, mixed with spots of break dance and lip sync. It’s full of Houston’s personality, but not perhaps the attention-grabbing opener the launch show needs.
The Joseph Toonga company, also from the UK, ends Act One with an indulgently long piece, Born to Protest: The Reframe, whose meaning is never fully clear. Touring a couple of years ago, where it was performed by three male and one female dancer, it has been reinterpreted here as an all-female quartet playing out a series of solidarity, ritualistic and aggressive movements. It is certainly an expressive and complex dance for the company to perform with big arm and leg shapes, stomping and body rolls in endless loops that are clearly exhausting, yet the emotion of it never quite compensates for its length as the multiple phases of the dance drag on.
Meanwhile, Kaner Scott offers a far too brief reflection on video game and smartphone culture, acting like a controlling drug for the mind, which offers some fascinating contortion and robotic movement in a pop culture design as the two dancers move through a number of worlds that could have lingered far longer.
After the interval, Act Two offers an equally thoughtful but very different piece from Italian company Compagnia Bellanda that blends text projection with emotive physical entanglements between two people as their once passionate relationship becomes mired in intimacy and fear before dissolving entirely. The karma sutra-like blending of limbs and bodies becomes an equally engaging mix of theatre and dance.
Despite its own remit, this evening of Breakin’ Convention performances rather lacks the hip hop that everyone has really come for, leaving US company Rock Force Crew to end the night with a pure hip hop set telling the history of the crew across its four decades of development. Finally, the energy the audience has been craving is transmitted through the locking and popping, break dancing and freestyling offered by this pure hip hop finale. This evening at Sadler’s Wells is fine, but it feels like a rare fallow year for the Breakin’ Convention set, failing to find the “kinetic friction between surfaces, bodies and ideologies” that Jonzi D promises at the start. Next year, just more pure hip hop, please!
Reviewed on 1 May 2026
Breakin’ Convention 2026 continues until 3 May 2026
