Land of the free movers: how jookin street dancer Lil Buck’s 1776 reframes independence

In a collaboration with young British dancers, supported by Oxford’s new Schwarzman Centre, the Memphis dancer tackles US history’s ‘broken promise’ of equality in a performance filled with spark

Way back in 2011 – that’s ancient in internet terms – Memphis street dancer Charles Riley, aka Lil Buck, went viral in an unlikely partnership with cellist Yo-Yo Ma, dancing to Saint-Saëns’ The Swan. Buck’s dance, a style of footwork called jookin, sees him glide across the floor with boneless grace, walking on air. Unlike a lot of hip-hop and street dance (and contemporary dance too), which is heavily rooted to the earth, jookin goes the way of ballet, sidelining gravity.

Buck’s career since has seen him dancing with Madonna, Alicia Keys and Mikhail Baryshnikov; he’s worked with Versace, Spike Lee and Cirque du Soleil. Now his latest collab is with Oxford University, where he was invited to be a visiting fellow at the new Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities, built with a £185m donation from US private equity billionaire and Trump donor Stephen Schwarzman, whose portrait hangs at the entrance of what’s an impressively vast and light space with a concert hall, two theatres, gallery and cinema. It also houses a range of the university’s humanities faculties and the new Institute for Ethics in AI, the idea being that these disciplines might work together and close gaps between academics and artistic practitioners.