Photographs courtesy Lil Buck. Graphic design by Brian Groppe.
“How would you describe your relationship with gravity?” It’s not a standard interview question, or, for that matter, one I’d ask just about anyone else in just about any other circumstance.
But I’m talking with Charles 'Lil Buck' Riley, and I can’t not ask him about the 9.8 meters-per-second force that dictates the way most of us move across Earth’s surface. If you’ve watched Buck dance — either on stage with New Ballet Ensemble in the annual Nut ReMix, on the street (back in the day, he used to dance on Beale), in a commercial, or in any number of viral YouTube videos — you know that he moves with preternatural freedom, sometimes flowing like liquid, sometimes floating as air.
Born in Chicago in 1988, Buck moved to Memphis in the mid-nineties, when he was 8. In more recent years, he’s danced with Madonna, performed alongside Yo-Yo Ma, danced on the stage of the Lincoln Center, in a Super Bowl halftime show, on the Great Wall of China. And he’s playing the Mouse King in the recently released Disney version of the Tchaikovsky-scored ballet classic: The Nutcracker and the Four Realms. But still, Buck says he “learned most everything that I know dealing with dance, what I still do right now, from Memphis.”
He “learned how to grow up fast in Memphis, as well,” he adds. The family lived in a few places in South Memphis, where Buck attended Riverview Elementary and Middle Schools, then Carver High School. From Carver, he transferred to the Yo! Memphis Academy, a performing- and visual-arts-focused school, since shuttered.
Buck didn’t learn to dance in schools or dance studios — not at first. He started dancing with his sister, Stephanie: two little kids in their living room, after school and after church, studying all of Michael Jackson’s moves. Their mom, Sabrina Moore, would bring home VHS tapes, including one from Jackson’s Badtour. He remembers that he and Stephanie “would just practice a lot, wearing our church outfits. Trying to be as fresh and clean as Michael Jackson was on tour.” There wasn’t TiVo back then, so they would try to absorb the moves as well as possible, as quickly as possible.
It was when the family (Moore worked at a clothing store; Buck’s father, also named Charles Riley, drove a truck) moved to Memphis that Buck’s dancing became original, creative. In his final year at Riverview Middle, he was introduced to jookin, again through his sister, who had been turned onto the quintessentially Memphis hip-hop-inspired dance style by Zephaniah Jenkins. Jookin is a dance style born in Memphis. Its origins are in the gangsta walk of the 1980s, a group line dance, which evolved over time into the glides, sudden bucks, and toe holds integral to the form today. Jenkins had taught Buck’s sister a jookin routine to a Project Pat song; Buck says he remembers “just loving how that whole style looked.”
As soon as he had seen jookin once, he started to see it everywhere — “like when you love a car, when you see that car for the first time, and it ends up being your favorite. You start seeing it a lot more on the road.” All the sudden, jookin was all around him. Buck became a leading practitioner, at the U-Dig Dance Academy but also on streets, in parking lots, and in MySpace videos and the still often-cited Memphis Jookin Vol. 1 video, produced by Jai Armmer, Buck’s manager to this day.
Buck became involved with Memphis’ New Ballet Ensemble as a high school student, too, already prodigiously talented as a jooker, and already gifted at some of the unexpected crossover skills intertwining jookin and ballet — like long, long toe holds, when Buck balances on the toes of his sneakers in a way that brings to mind a ballet dancer poised on pointe. (He has said a pair of sneakers lasts him about two and a half weeks, moving the way he does.)
New Ballet CEO and artistic director Katie Smythe tells me Buck watched the professional male dancers at New Ballet and was especially drawn to pirouettes — a ballet spin on the toes of one foot. But he also wanted to perfect moves that terrified Smythe, a former professional ballerina herself.
“He wasn’t doing that hyper-over-the-arch [of the foot] stuff yet,” she remembers, when she met him. “That’s something he developed on his own, and he was determined to do. I tried to push him against it because it terrified me.” She mentions that Buck has sustained injuries as a result of his trademark “over-stretching of the ligaments at the ankle and turning on the inside of his foot.”
With Smythe in the driver’s seat, he made a trip to West Memphis, Arkansas, as part of a school outreach effort; he danced to Camille Saint-Saëns’ “Dying Swan” in an entirely improvised, deeply expressive, lyrical style — part ballet, part jookin, almost unbelievably flexible and flowing, balanced and bouncing. Smythe played him the Saint-Saëns for the first time in the car, as they were crossing the bridge from Memphis to Arkansas. Played it once. Buck was slated to perform the role of the hunter in “Peter and the Wolf,” so he was in what Smythe recalls as a “hip hop hunter’s outfit,” all camo, not very swanlike. But then he started moving.
The performance was caught on a video that Damian Woetzel, now the president of The Juilliard School, and Heather Watts, Woetzel’s wife and a former principal ballerina with the New York City Ballet, chanced upon online. Things started happening quickly.
“I think he’s a genius.” — Yo-Yo Ma
Woetzel, a sort of matchmaker for creativity, was connected to Yo-Yo Ma through President Obama’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities. And he wondered, “Hey, what would happen if we take this dancer, and this musician. . .”
Which is how a kid from South Memphis came to be dancing while Yo-Yo Ma played the cello, in a performance that was recorded on a cell phone by filmmaker Spike Jonze, then seen by Disney producers. “I think he’s a genius,” Ma later told The New York Times.
The crazy thing about Buck’s Mouse King role in the Disney picture is that the producers had no idea, when they reached out to his management, that he had been dancing the part of the Mouse King for years, in New Ballet’s annual Nut ReMix. “It’s amazing how I’ve always been prepping for this moment,” says Buck, “and didn’t even know it.”
In recent Instagram posts, Buck marked the premiere of The Nutcracker and the Four Realms, lifted up Memphis jookin’, and introduced the latest work from Movement Art Is.
He’ll be back in Memphis in December for Nut ReMix (performances are at the Cannon Center, December 14-16). Katie Smythe, who wrote Nut ReMixin 2003, says she never wanted to interfere with more traditional performances of the Nutcracker. But she did want to do something “completely different.”
The story has changed a bit each year, making it relevant to the dancers’ lives and bringing in elements like interracial love. Smythe made the Nutcracker role a Marine, or some manner of serviceman (the details have changed over the years), who is being called to war; he’s still a Marine. “I thought as long as we’re at war, I’m never going to change it, so I haven’t. Isn’t that sad?” There’s a great deal of Memphis in the story (Beale Street and blues), but other cultures make appearances too. The whole performance has changed so much over the year that, Smythe says, “It’s hard to give choreography credit, because it’s one big collaboration with student voice in it, teacher voice in it, and my original voice.”
I ask Buck why he comes back home every year for the ReMix. After all, he’s now got a Disney movie under his belt, he’s danced in commercials for Versace (with whom he created a line of sneakers), Lexus, Apple. This magazine receives no ad revenue from that Cupertino, California, company, but take one minute and one second, right now, and watch Buck’s AirPods commercial — it is mesmerizing, particularly the moment near the end of the spot when he appears to be teetering at the precipice before a sky full of stars.)
He doesn’t hesitate: “Because Memphis has never left me.” Buck didn’t grow up in an affluent part of town, but he did grow up knowing the power of inspiration. And he knows that he is, himself, an inspiration to young people, especially in Memphis — he knows what this means, the weight it carries and places on his often-bouncing shoulders.
Lil Buck with some of the youngest Nut ReMix cast members.
“I’m their living testament,” he tells me, “of breaking boundaries. That you can make it, even though you’re a dancer in Memphis that comes from the streets, or from the struggle. I want more of the youth that are coming up into the same world, the same environment that I grew up in, that don’t know that there’s a way or don’t think that they’re talented enough. I want to be that living proof to them.” And, he adds, “It has to be more than just them seeing me on TV.”
“I want to be living proof to the youth that are coming up into the same world I grew up in,” he says.
As Smythe puts it, after learning I have a ballet background, “Then you know — some of us are just wired this way. It’s how we express ourselves.” The children who come to New Ballet who are “the most passionate,” she goes on, “are the ones whose parents tell me, ‘They’re dancing in the kitchen all the time. We have to tell them to cut it out.’ There’s something about kitchens.” I offer: “It’s the floors.” Yes, it’s the floors, but it’s also the joy — the joy that finds articulation.
“Memphis has never left me.” — Lil Buck
Inspiration comes locally, person-to-person, or at least it did for Buck. After being introduced to jookin through his sister, he was “always dancing, always moving, always jookin. You can ask anybody that’s ever been around me.” When he moved to Westwood, in high school, he encountered more peers and role models whose moves he could study. “Dale and Peewee were my homies,” he remembers. “Every time I’d come home from school, we’d be dancing in the carport of my house. We’d always be jookin.”
In high school, one of Buck’s friends acquired a Camcorder that the group would use to film themselves, then examine the footage to understand how to improve, how to accentuate and embellish. But he hadn’t met the “real guys” yet — Marico Flake, Daniel Price, G-Nerd, BoBo.
And he hadn’t been to the Crystal Palace yet.
Lil Buck performing in New Ballet Ensemble’s 2012 Springloaded. Photos courtesy NBE.
Buck speaks of that fateful visit to the Crystal Palace as if the South Memphis skating rink had the Holy Grail hidden somewhere behind the snack bar. And for jookin, at that time, it did.
“One day, I went and saw this guy named BoBo there,” Buck tells me. “And I don’t think he used to go there often, because he was from North Memphis, I believe, or West Memphis — I forget. But I saw him at the Crystal Palace — he had, like, gold in his mouth. It was the hood. We all wanted that. We all wanted to look like that. He had a big circle around him, and when I looked in that circle, he was gliding on the carpet grinning, just smiling, and gliding so smooth across the carpet like it was water.”
That was the moment when Buck received the deep inspiration that has carried him through his career as a dancer. The moment when he knew this was what he wanted to do — not just after school, in his living room, but with his life.
He sometimes calls himself a movement artist nowadays. (And sometimes an actor — in addition to the Mouse King role for Disney, he’ll appear next year in a feature film about John Brown’s 1859 raid on Harper’s Ferry.) Indeed, the company he’s founded in collaboration with Miami-native Jon Boogz is called MAI, or Movement Art Is, described as “an organization focused on using movement artistry to inspire change in the world.”
Boogz and Buck first connected while both were dancing in California. Buck had flown out to California to dance in a music video; not long after, he moved there, started street performing in Santa Monica, building a dance crew. Boogz was out in the LA area as well, and the two met at the Debbie Reynolds Dance Studio’s Groove Night. Boogz “had a certain style about him that I knew wasn’t from LA. He popped to the same music I would jook to — being from the South, from Miami, Florida, and me being from Memphis, it was like a whole different way of how we saw dance.”
Not only did the two share an affinity for street dance — believing it to be a fine art in itself — they also felt that their art was part of a bigger cultural mission. Buck soon went off on tour with Madonna, landing in Las Vegas to do the Michael Jackson Cirque du Soleil show — and as fate would have it, Boogz joined that same Cirque show as Buck was transitioning out of it. Buck describes this as an example of the “law of attraction.” Both men were interested in creating films, feeling that most dance films out there didn’t go far enough in advancing meaningful “different narratives, powerful and strong narratives.”
Boogz and Buck started working together, investing their own money in MAI, directing films as well as running workshops, performances, and exhibitions. Color of Reality was the first film; in it, they collaborated with artist Alexa Meade, an LA-based painter who daubs paint on people to make them appear two-dimensional, like moving paintings. That was followed by Am I A Man, centering on mass incarceration, and Honor Thy Mother, about treating Earth more lovingly, performed in collaboration with spoken-word artist Robin Sanders. Their latest, The Price of Life, also features spoken word by Sanders, but centers on the epidemic of gun violence and its effect on communities, in particular on children.
Not small issues: mass incarceration, environmental devastation, gun violence — and not entertaining topics, either. The videos are beautifully rendered, the dance exquisite, and in moments — because Buck and Boogz move so expressively — exquisitely painful to watch. On the evening we spoke, Buck’s most recent public news was the Disney premiere — but what had been keeping him most busy that day were meetings to continue developing projects for Movement Art Is.
In Lil Buck’s Instagram feed (@lilbuckdalegend), a preview of The Price of Life, posted on October 31st, appears immediately on the heels of a video, posted October 30th, of a smiling Buck and his proud family on the red carpet for the Nutcracker and the Four Realmspremiere. There’s no apparent friction between the big-screen star in him and the socially conscious artist — each pursuit bolsters the other.
What’s next for this always gliding, always moving artist? There’s a film coming out next year called Emperor. A historical drama about Shields Green, an escaped slave and an associate of Frederick Douglass and John Brown, the film centers on the pivotal 1859 raid on Harper’s Ferry. Buck will play Meshach, who aids Green in the search for underground railroads. He can’t disclose many details yet, but he does let slip, “In this film, I’m not dancing at all. I play a character that has to communicate solely through emotion.” He laughs: “That’s all I’m going to give you. I can’t give you anymore.”
Fair enough. He has given us so much already.
