For the third year running the Wells' hip-hop weekend has been breaking box office records, yet the larger the crowds it attracts the less it merits the self-congratulatory pun of its title. As a forum for all types of hip-hop - from old skool breakdance to new skool krump - Breakin' Convention may be unparalleled in Britain. But none of the acts I saw on Saturday could justify the claim that anyone was breaking new ground.
Physically, some of the moves on stage were as thrilling as only hip-hop can be. The UK crew Flawless have grown into a razor sharp ensemble, strutting through formations so expert and so straight-up sexy that they had a core constituency of teenage girls screaming in the aisles. At the other extreme, the artier conceits of German soloist Storm were also rocking the crowd. Duets he danced with his own image on screen were engagingly slick, and footage that showed him on a hip voyage through a city crowd struck a wittily anti-heroic note. But Storm's only deviations from the basic hip-hop vocabulary were a series of gratuitous, clumsy animal impersonations, and the sense of deja vu that haunted the evening grew stronger as the acts got bigger.
The west coast crew Medea Sirkus, while promising a futuristic take on boogaloo, sleepwalked through a glossy synchronised poppin' routine that could have come straight out of a Michael Jackson video. Even the latest work, Transe, by headlining act Wanted Posse, was fundamentally lazy. Move for move this French crew can be heartstopping, especially the lead dancer, whose upper body is so fiercely muscled that he can not only balance for minutes on his hands but actually dance rhythmically and gracefully on them. But the vague voodoo narrative in which the dancing is packaged is just an irksome, even embarrassing distraction.
While hip-hop can boast levels of loyalty, energy and skill that many other dance forms would kill for, it hasn't yet claimed a future for itself on the stage.
