Hip hop and urban music was the soundtrack to Duwane Taylor’s boyhood in Tottenham, and he got a rude awakening when he left school with no career plans and on a whim signed up for a dance course at Barnet College.

He found himself having to don ballet slippers and learn how to jeté and pirouette and says the culture shock left him floundering and teased by his friends.

Thankfully he found his feet and discovered he not only had a talent but also a passion for dance, and four years after graduating he was helping to co-ordinate the 1,500 dancers in the London 2012 Olympic Opening Ceremony: “An amazing experience,“ says the 26-year-old.

Now the Holloway resident is helping others defy expectations with Buckness Personified, the UK’s first all-female krumping crew, who will take to the stage this weekend at Sadler’s Wells for dance festival Breakin’ Convention (May 1 to 4).

“Krump is very male-dominated and I wanted to push krump towards females and use it to empower female dancers,“ says Duwane of the aggressive dance style invented in Los Angeles in the early 2000s, which features stomps, chest pops, arm points and jabs.

“I have spoken to a lot of girls who don’t want to look manly. Also you will see a lot of aggressive faces being pulled in it and they don’t like looking like that.

“But I want to show that girls can do it and remain feminine, they just have a whole different way of being feminine and aggressive.“

Formed in 2012 the Stratford-based crew got to the semi-final of Got to Dance 2013 and has trained with krumpers from all over the world including the creators of the dance style Ceasare ’Tight Eyez’ Willis and Jo’Artis ’Big Mijo’ Ratti and have even filmed a video with them.

“Having the respect from them is amazing,“ says Duwane. “We never expected that, but it just proves that the things we are trying to do is making waves internationally. Having them as fans of our work is the best thing we could have asked for.“

The group has also caught the attention of pop singer Alexandra Burke who asked Duwane and another member to dance in the video for her single Renegade, which is released this week.

“She knows one of the members of the group so has seen our work quite a lot and she really understood the basis of the style and just saw it with her track which was great,“ says Duwane.

It’s hard to believe that the former pupil of The John Loughborough Seventh Day Adventist School in Tottenham almost didn’t find his way into the dance world.

“I didn’t do dance before at all, I was in a completely different life,“ recalls Duwane of his teenage years.

“I feel like I’m a creative person and the school didn’t really cater for that, it was quite by the book and that was the only way to learn – to be academic.

“So I didn’t have much prospects coming out of school and didn’t have any clue where to go or what to do – dance was a bit of random decision.“

It was while interviewing for a place on the drama course at Barnet Collage that he decided the dance teacher looked “more fun“ and so switched despite never having had any dance lessons before.

“It was very different from what I thought it would be,“ he says of his training. “I thought it would be urban style because that’s the music I was listening to and the culture I was in to. But I had to learn ballet and contemporary for two years – fortunately we didn’t have to wear tights.

“People I met on my course carried on training me after it had finished and said I was doing really well and helped me to push myself further.“

His first professional job was with Boy Blue in Pied Piper at the Barbican and then the UK tour, which he says gave him a standard he felt he had to live up to.

And he says this striving to be the best was also why he chose the name Buckness Personified for his crew.

“The word buck is to describe something good in krump or the feeling of krump.

“We liked the idea of being the personification of the feeling of krump, to always give us something that we need to live up to.”

He says the audience should expect something “epic“ from their Breakin’ Convention performance and adds: “What I’m trying to do is change the traditional way people see krump, and push the boundaries and create krump theatre with a deeper meaning.“

Sadler’s Wells, Rosebry Avenue, Islington, May 1 to 4. Details: breakinconvention.com, 0844 412 4300, sadlerswells.com