The all-girl dance crew

(Jean Goldsmith)

The SINstar Bgirls crew includes Chi-Boogie, Ladybug, Raquit, RascElle and Remady. Their artistic director is TrubL Roc (aka Lucy). SIN stands for Strength In Numbers.

"It's a more united feeling, dancing in a girls' crew," says TrubL Roc. "When I started out, there weren't many girls in UK hip hop so a lot of us thought we had to be strong like a boy, or get our cleavages out like French B-girls. We don't do either of those things.

"We've got inner strength without being butch. We dress like girls, with big earrings and necklaces that are always falling in our mouths at inopportune moments, and we dance like girls. We get style and confidence from each other, definitely." In dance, or in life? "There's no separation!"

TrubL Roc and a friend she had been breakdancing with since primary school started their first all-girl group, Cassé, in Cambridge 10 years ago. "I was 18 and I already had one of my daughters, who used to come to training when she was tiny, sitting in a car seat, bobbing her head. We did an all-girl showcase at the UK Championships in 1999 and the blokes who told us it would never work were like, hang on, we want a bit of this. We thought about having them in the group but they were so moody and took up so much floor space in practice that it made us realise we had something special being just girls."