Breakin' convention evaluate – hip-hop squads invade stage at dance weekender - The Guardian

Pinging like golf balls … the Ruggeds at Breakin' conference competition. image: Paul Hampartsoumian

There's always a buzz at Breakin' convention. For 13 years, the hip-hop dance weekender has filled Sadler's Wells with a young, upbeat and vocal crowd, egged on with the aid of the festival's affable founder and director Jonzi D. Opening the Sunday nighttime programme had been pageant favourites Boy Blue enjoyment, whose Emancipation of Expressionism 2 showcases the impressive technical and performative skill of their youthful forged. graceful, super-synchronised and fantastically disciplined, they wind themselves into stressful knots and explode in stuttering steps that pinpoint each beat, our bodies strafed by way of lights and smoke. the following duet, Kaleidoscope by means of Sharifa Tonkmor and Maren Ellermann, doesn't fairly obtain the identical exactness, however its doll-like articulations and angular, floor-sure movements give it a greater offbeat, unconventional seem to be.

Antoinette Gomis (France), Iron Skulls (Spain) and the Ruggeds (Netherlands) reprise items shown in final yr's festival. Gomis's images portrays a woman's adventure from subjugation in opposition t vanity. It's a powerful discipline however the choreography is slight; Gomis dances neatly satisfactory – from hesitant gesticulations via to weighty, full-bodied freedom – however for depth and discovery all you need is the Nina Simone soundtrack. The masked Iron Skulls troupe invade the stage from the auditorium of their soldierly Sinestesia. The work wavers between stagey outcomes (wandering searchlights, white clouds, massed actions) and moments of emotional force (stylised jitters, parachuting jumps, photographs of fight and capitulation). The Ruggeds' Adrenaline additionally opens with an excessively militaristic suppose, however a bebop tune later releases the dancers right into a fluid, personable dynamic: they ping goofily off gymnasium balls and spin like teeteri ng gyroscopes, their stunts and hints as exciting as they're amazing.

Watch a clip of Iron Skulls' Sinestesia

in their somewhat donning Womanoïde, the French feminine quartet Bandidas portray a squad of silvery space robots, pounding the ground to an assaultive beat like video-online game androids. Hip-hop choreography can have a tendency against militarism, with drilled formations, combat scenes, uniform costumes, but the French company Enfants Prodiges stay away from such overtones with deft touches of slapstick (head-butting an invisible drive container), informal showmanship (one man looks to walk up a wall manufactured from air) and sheer aptitude.

both shock acts of the nighttime couldn't be greater distinctive. The rubber-limbed Soweto Skeleton Movers, from South Africa, have an utterly disarming trend called pantsula it is rough-hewn, knockabout and playful. With a soar of their steps and appears of mischief, they twizzle into pretzels, play miraculous hints with floating hats and turn their limbs into skipping ropes and Hula Hoops. In contrast, the rising British choreographer Ivan Blackstock explores violence, alienation and ritual in an excerpt of his coming near near work Traplord of the Flyz. Nightmarish pictures meld with ominous rap and a effective physicality: a pig masks, the puff and glow of narcotics, black men in blackface, the physique as a battleground. Blackstock is one to watch: here's now not hip-hop adapted for theatre; it's theatre expressed through hip-hop.

• At cast, Doncaster, on 7 can also. container office: 01302 303 959. Then journeying unless 1 June.