No passengers at Sadler’s Wells on Monday night. We were all there, dancers and audience, because we love hip-hop (“At your age, Clement”, someone said, “it should be a Hip Op”), breaking, locking, and those other rich forms of street dance. This was the closing night of the fifth annual Breakin’ Convention, and spiffing it was. Here was that ideal dance-state (and one so ideal that it seemed impossible of realisation), where the watchers are as dedicated, as knowledgeable, as the performers; where, indeed, there seems no separation between public and stage, between art and consumer.

I watched for two blissful hours in a theatre crammed with devotees. As with flamenco, which street dance resembles in its immediacy, we, the audience, were intimately involved. You have to shout at the dancers, urge them on, tell them how much you love what they are doing, and how closely you identify with them. A spectacular back-flip, a super-acrobatic contortion of torso and legs, winding in on itself and then releasing a burst of freeing energy, must be greeted.