The 2008 edition of Breakin' Convention will be remembered as the year that Sadler's Wells' annual hip-hop dance theatre festival grew up. The brainchild of the London-based performer and director Jonzi D, this international event has now been running for five seasons. Just in case we forgot the significance of this birthday, during each of the festival's three long, noisy and often exhilarating Bank Holiday weekend nights Jonzi ushered on stage one or two bashful-looking five-year-olds who brought down the house with their unexpectedly furious moves. Kids' stuff? Literally. But also a handy reminder of just how pervasive a cultural influence hip-hop is.

Spotlighting close to 30 professional companies and youth groups, the bill proved again the phenomenal popularity of hip-hop dance as entertainment. Predominantly young, knowledgeable audiences who might not normally come to London's premier dance venue went wild over the testosterone-fuelled Russian b-boy crew Top 9, a superb demonstration of old-school locking by Japan's sexy and stylish GoGo Brothers and a fabulously funny revamp of The Nutcracker engineered by the Danish popping master MrSteen.

The programme also did its best to show how this vast genre of dance theatre continues to mature artistically as its practitioners grapple with serious issues. Saleté (“Dirt”), by France's Compagnie Farid'O, was a provocative, beautifully crafted and thrillingly danced meditation on cultural misunderstanding about an embittered illegal immigrant who sells flowers in Austria. Despite technical glitches and a soupçon of Gallic pretension this was a work that sticks in the mind.

The same can be said of an hour-long production from the remarkable Brazilian company Membros. Fevre (“Fever”) was a riveting, sensitively stylised study of a society whose members are addicted, frustrated, exhausted and utterly brutalised. No place for the clichés of samba and sun here, nor the exuberant stunts and show-off skills that typify the hip-hop genre. Moving, powerful and performed with exceptional dignity by a cast of six, this piece of feel-bad dance theatre made for harsh but required viewing.

The rest of Breakin' Convention was stuffed with goodies, from the semi-improvised noodlings of the French trio Styl'O'styl (set to live jazz-rock) to Mad World, Kenrick “H20” Sandy's flawless solo about a pitiably soulless businessman. The Austrian Nobulos scored a hit with the fresh physical invention streaking their cautionary tale Out of the Shadow.

The festival's finale was an unpredictable and unforgettably cheeky critique of dictatorial governments everywhere by MyoSung, an all-male troupe that operates under the auspices of the Korean collective Project Soul. Topical, comic, shambolic and, like the festival that hosted it, fantastic.

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