Dancing with the stars: Flawless hook up with the ENB

The super-buff North London street dancers who make up Flawless back-flipped on to our screens in 2009, when the notoriously hard-to-please Simon Cowell described their Britain’s Got Talent audition as ‘one of the best things I have seen in my life’. The troupe went all the way to the show’s final but missed out on the top spot, coming behind runner-up Susan Boyle and the winners, rival dancers Diversity. Since then, however, the group has performed in music videos with Madonna and Beyoncé, and they are now swapping their trainers for tutus in a unique collaboration with English National Ballet.

The unlikely coupling was the brainchild of Flawless founder Marlon ‘Swoosh’ Wallen. ‘We met [ENB] at Buckingham Palace in May last year when we were all performing for the Queen. I had this idea, so I approached one of the ENB directors straight away that night and it was an immediate positive reaction.’

Their new piece, Against Time, is choreographed by ENB soloist Jenna Lee and Flawless and will be a fusion of ballet and street dance – the whole thing is strangely similar to the plot of the 2010 cult British film StreetDance 3D, in which Flawless appeared. ‘It’s not just going to be a collaboration where we’re on one side and ENB’s on the other,’ Marlon promises, ‘but also we don’t want to say that the ballet girls are now hip-hop dancers, or the boys are now ballet dancers. We want to make the styles sync.’

It’s been a steep learning curve for both groups and they are rehearsing eight hours a day, the boys struggling with the lifts and the girls with, well, everything. ‘As a ballet dancer you’re so upright and solid,’ says ENB artist Jennie Harrington, ‘but the guys are very loose in their upper bodies. It’s extremely challenging; we have basically had to start from scratch.’ It sounds tough, but rehearsals are apparently so much fun that they draw an audience from the rest of the ballet company, who are a little jealous as well as intrigued.

And it’s not all work. Although there are yet to be any cross-genre romances, the dancers clearly love working together and are all completely enthused by the project. They spend most of the ES shoot playfully teasing each other and gossiping, and have already had a few riotous nights out together. In fact, it’s going so well that Marlon hopes this will be the start of a series of collaborations. ‘This is ground-breaking, and it’s going to change a lot of views on both styles. I think it’s going to make people more experimental.’

Lucy Hunter Johnston

Against Time is at the HMV Apollo Hammersmith on 1 and 2 June. Tickets from £10 (ballet.org.uk)