By David Jays (The Sunday Times, London)

A greedy voice yelled: “I want more!” On the first night of Breakin’ Convention, the annual festival of hip-hop dance at Sadler’s Wells, the audience was ready to whoop. Now five years old, the event owns the bank-holiday weekend, assembling a scintillating collection of rippling speed, arresting stillness and the odd pelvic swirl. It took a while, surfing on goodwill, but the opening night delivered, as the artistic director, Jonzi D, pledged, “an intense show”. The theatre was rammed, with the foyers full of graffiti, and people in the mosh pit showing off their own moves in the interval. Jonzi D, co-compering with Bustah, is an immensely cheery presence - if ever he tires of this hip-hop lark, panto beckons. The energy is friendly, even cosy.

Saturday evening’s opening acts were young UK crews, often with incongruous introductions. “There’s some healthy hip-hop firing now in Cambridge,” Jonzi would say; or he’d extol High Wycombe’s pioneering scene. Next year, prepare for the Lytham St Anne’s massive. At times, it felt as if we were in Britain’s funkiest village hall - especially when Claudia, a five-year-old, was brought before the curtain. UK hip-hop may have found its own Bonnie Langford.

Is the scene moving from street to stage school? Of course, it’s unfair to demand that hip-hoppers live the life: we don’t ask ballerinas to have a working knowledge of fairies.But Membros, Saturday night’s head-liners, know what they’re about. Founded by Tais Vieira, the company from inner-city Brazil explore addiction, violence and exploitation in the dynamic Febre (Fever).

An audience that had been howling on the pyrotechnics took a while to realise they were watching more than stunts. The sickening slam of a body, the thump of someone landing on another dancer’s prone spine, the sole woman in the cast being spun around by her ears: all is performed with terrible bravado. The soundtrack may mix Ave Maria and bossa nova, but salvation and sensuality falter amid the desolation. There was rousing stuff, too, from Plague, a UK company directed by Mukhtar OS Mukhtar of Cirque du Soleil. A mental-asylum phantasmagoria, it had dancers throwing shapes while throwing fits, with a galvanic horror-movie vibe.

It couldn’t be more different from Cheltenham, where I caught Birmingham Royal Ballet’s mid-scale tour. A decorous Victorian theatre, silvered matinée audience and Rice Krispie cakes at the interval. Every spring, BRB splits, sending one programme to the northeast (this year, it includes Balan-chine and Bintley) and another sou’west. Kicking off in Cheltenham was Ashton’s Dante Sonata, suggested by the Inferno and set to Liszt. Made in 1940, at a tense point of the war, it’s sadly still unusual. You can see why original audiences responded so keenly: Ashton nailed a craving that everything would be all right, and the terrible fear that it wouldn’t. In the sinking gestures of consolation, your heart can still contract.

In Cheltenham, BRB’s dancers looked baffled, giving it immense effort, but almost no conviction. The children of light, in floaty white nighties, are ambushed by the children of darkness, with serpentine thongs twirling round biceps. Rather than an elemental conflict, it looked like a fight breaking out in Ann Summers.

After Small Worlds, an elegant piece by a company dancer, Kit Holder - inspired by, but considerably less quirky than, Kan-dinsky’s paintings - the programme closed with MacMillan’s Elite Syncopations (1974). Ian Spurling’s costumes may have dated (this is what Bertie Bassett would take to the charity shop), but the roguish ragtime assembly lifted the afternoon. Apart from Nao Sakuma’s leading lady, everybody seemed to enjoy swivelling their bum and kicking up their pins to Scott Joplin rags, played by a vimful on-stage band, their sultry minxiness and whole lot of leg steaming up bifocals in the royal circle.