A teenage girl is walking around on her hands; a ginger-haired b-boy is enacting acrobatic backslides; and a girl in heavy braids is standing - rather nonchalantly - on her head. In one corner a gang of kids in hoodies and low-slung pants are throwing violent, carefully choreographed shapes in front of a giant mirror; in another corner, a strapping Nigerian lad is dragging up in a blond wig and a shocking pink frock to practise a waltz.

Welcome to the rehearsals for the hip-hop dance company ZooNation, whose “urban fairytale” Into the Hoods makes the leap from the dance fringe to the theatrical mainstream when it opens in London's West End later this month.

ZooNation are just one of hundreds of companies around the world which specialise in hip-hop dance, ensembles that are as likely to come from South Korea, Japan, Austria, France or Brazil as they are from the United States. London alone is home to some of the best: Robert Hylton's Urban Classicism, Jonzi D Productions, Kenrick Sandy's BoyBlue, Hakeem Onibudo's Impact Dance, Simeon Qsyea's Birdgang, plus the likes of Dance 2XS, Sophistifunk, Funkstylerz and Pink Mafia.

However, where most of these companies tend to present their work as a series of unrelated routines, only a few (such as the Anglo-Swedish troupe Bounce, currently doing a version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest at the Peacock Theatre in London) have tried to weave them into a piece of unified physical theatre. And none, until now, has taken that into the heart of the West End for an extended run.

“Hip-hop dance usually works in short bursts,” says Kate Prince, the 33-year-old director and choreographer of ZooNation. “But there are only so many incredible shapes and tight choreography and flips that you can watch while going ‘whoo-hoo!' We wanted to take those routines and weave them into a proper story.”

Which is what makes ZooNation's Into the Hoods so groundbreaking. It's a piece of hip-hop dance with a full narrative, one that strings all those acrobatic b-boying staples such as the backslide, the windmill, the moonwalk, the uprock, the downrock, the freeze and the suicide into a story.

“It started as a joke,” says Prince. “A friend had seen one of our routines at a show, where I had tried to tell a story. He was saying, ‘I can tell you're not really committed to doing a narrative. Why don't you try telling a hip-hop fairytale?' I immediately thought of Stephen Sondheim's Into the Woods, which tangles together four different fairytales, and I jokingly suggested doing an urban hip-hop version called Into Da Hoodz. And then we both thought, actually, that's not a bad idea...”

During a two-week workshop at the London School of Contemporary Dance, the story quickly took shape. The two lost children of Sondheim's story are transformed into truanting schoolkids who find themselves stranded in an inner-city tower block called the Ruff Endz Estate, where they encounter urbanised versions of fairytale characters. Cinderella becomes Spinderella, a beautiful, put-upon DJ; Rapunzel becomes a blonde MC called Rap-On-Zel; Little Red Riding Hood is the hoodie-clad R&B singer Lil' Red; Prince Charming is a two-timing hip-hop Lothario; while Jack from Jack and the Beanstalk is a skateboarding, beat-making producer called Jaxx who lives in the basement (geddit?) and who routs the drug-dealing Giant.

The finished production is a buzzy, vibrant and often very funny show, told by a narrator and accompanied by a montage of hip-hop, soul and pop songs that chime perfectly with the story (thus Lupe Fiasco's Kick Push plays when the skateboarder enters and Prince Charming's entrance is heralded by 112's Girl, I'm a Player). But the main weight of the narrative is carried by the cast, comprising 18 adult dancers (aged 17-35), and two seven-year-olds (Russell Royer and Alicia Lai) as the lost infants.

“The challenge when casting this is that we don't just need incredible dancers, but we need people who can do comedy, or play a romantic lead, or play an elderly character,” says Prince. “And a lot of dancers - who are trained to do backing routines as part of a chorus line - simply can't do that. So we need a mix of talents. You've got Roger Davies, who plays Prince Charming, who is primarily an actor who also dances. There are a handful of people who have some contemporary dance training, a few who are street dancers and one, Denny Haywood, who is a genuine, old-school hip-hop b-boy.

“It was also important to have as many styles as possible. One minute the dancers will be lindyhopping, the next they'll be crumping, then clowning, then popping, then body-locking, then doing acrobatic flips across the stage, then some physical theatre. They even waltz on one number.”

A version of the show was initially presented at the Peacock Theatre in London in 2006. After some good reviews it was taken to the Edinburgh Fringe two years in a row, where it became a huge critical and commercial hit and was seen by the big-name comedy and theatre promoter Phil McIntyre (the man behind We Will Rock You and Strictly Come Dancing Live). He sensed that an expanded version of the show had hit potential.

“When we first played in London, our audiences were predominantly young, urban and black,” says Prince. “But in Edinburgh we attracted a much more middle-class white audience, and that convinced everyone that this could really cut across boundaries.”

ZooNation's roots lie in a community project that Prince led at Stratford Circus, East London, in 2002. “Our brief was to write a musical in a week,” he says. “So I had 50 kids, aged 12 to 18, who had no interest in musicals, had never been to a theatre, and who were all snarling and shrugging their shoulders and sucking their teeth at me. And I quickly realised that the way to get them involved was to use music and dance. So we started to explore MC-ing, pirate radio, beats making.

“Suddenly these kids who I thought were going to knife me at the start of the week were reading me their rhymes, writing these sweet lyrics and coming up with ideas. By the end of the week they were all hugging each other, laughing and cheering. You could see that it was a huge adrenalin rush for them.

“If I have one aim with ZooNation it's that I want young urban dancers to have a career structure, a way into the theatre, just like a young ballet dancer might have. I want hip-hop dance to be taken seriously - up there with ballet, contemporary and jazz as a recognised art form.”

Into the Hoods, Novello Theatre, London WC2, now in preview, opens March 26 (www.zoonation.co.uk 0844 4825170)

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