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. Smythe played him the Saint-Saëns for the first time in the car, as they were crossing the bridge from Memphis to Arkansas. 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.
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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.” “That’s something he developed on his own, and he was determined to do. “He wasn’t doing that hyper-over-the-arch stuff yet,” she remembers, when she met him.
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But he also wanted to perfect moves that terrified Smythe, a former professional ballerina herself. 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. (He has said a pair of sneakers lasts him about two and a half weeks, moving the way he does.) 1 video, produced by Jai Armmer, Buck’s manager to this day.īuck 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. 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. You start seeing it a lot more on the road.” All the sudden, jookin was all around him. 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.”Īs 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. He remembers that he and Stephanie “would just practice a lot, wearing our church outfits. Their mom, Sabrina Moore, would bring home VHS tapes, including one from Jackson’s Badtour. 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.
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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.”īuck didn’t learn to dance in schools or dance studios - not at first.
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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. 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.īorn in Chicago in 1988, Buck moved to Memphis in the mid-nineties, when he was 8. “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.īut 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.