Lil Buck comes home for New Ballet Ensemble's 'Nut ReMix'

Has any Memphis artist been praised as extravagantly, enthusiastically and immediately — even Elvis and Eggleston were met with skepticism, remember — as Charles Riley III, the performer better known by his nom de danse, Lil Buck?

As the international ambassador of “jookin,” a Memphis-born style of street and club dancing, Lil Buck has been described in the past few years as a "Baryshnikov in sneakers" (The Miami Herald) and "a tremendous virtuoso" (The New Yorker) who moves with "seamless fluidity" (Los Angeles Times) as if on "a pillow of air" (London's Financial Times) while "flouting laws of gravity and anatomy" (The New York Times). Concluded The Wall Street Journal: "There is something modern and platform-agnostic about his style; it works before an art-world audience or among school kids or on TV."

Lithe and flexible and athletic, Riley, 28, describes himself as "a movement artist," a label that incorporates his mastery of Memphis hip-hop dance —  buckin', jookin, gangster walking, chopping — and the more classical disciplines of ballet, jazz dance and so on. But his restlessness isn't confined to his body.

"There's a lot of things happening in my head," Riley said earlier this week, just a couple of hours after returning to his hometown to prepare for this weekend's 14th annual performance of the New Ballet Ensemble's "Nut ReMix."

"My brain is on a different level," Riley continued. "I have visions, absolutely." He said he can anticipate sounds, even when improvising for the first time to new music. "I create different patterns and colors and vibrations. That's why a lot of my movements are unorthodox or wild. It's like a Wonka factory in my head."

Lil Buck shares jookin' genius in new videos on Nowness

Lil Buck was kind of Wonka-esque outside of his head, too. During his meeting with a reporter, Riley wore a jacket decorated with butterflies; a T-shirt depicting a skeleton with long Bob Marley dreadlocks cascading from its skull; and a white cap decorated with the anime character Mew, which Lil Buck described as "one of the hardest Pokemon characters to catch. It's symbolic of how much I'm flying, how much I'm on the road, and how hard it is to catch me."

After a year's absence from New Ballet's signature holiday show, Riley is back to take on the role of "Memphis Angel" in the 2016 edition of "Nut ReMix," a hip-hop-inflected redux of Tchaikovsky's famous Christmas ballet "The Nutcracker," seasoned this year with music by Duke Ellington, Booker T. & the MG's, and Motown songsmiths Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong, among other composers (Sam Shoup and Roy Brewer created many of the special arrangements). Presented by Nike, the show is produced by Joe Mulherin, with New Ballet Ensemble founder and artistic director Katie Smythe leading a team of choreographers.

With the Memphis Symphony Orchestra and MSO Big Band performing (under the direction of Ben Makino), and with close to 155 New Ballet Ensemble students participating in the multiple dance numbers, Lil Buck will have plenty of competition for the spotlight, even though his character appears in almost every scene.

"In a way, the character represents the life Charles is living now, because the angel shows the other kids from Memphis the life you can lead if you follow your dreams," said Smythe,  a mentor and champion of Riley's when the young dancer began training as a dancer at New Ballet.

Riley left Memphis at 19, taking a chance on a one-way ticket to Los Angeles to pursue a career as a dancer. Working such public spots as the highly trafficked Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica, he soon learned "it's insane, the money you can make in street performance."

Championed by various mentors and patrons, Lil Buck began to achieve notoriety when an online video of him improvising to Camille Saint-Saen's "Swan" — created at the suggestion of Smythe when Riley was with New Ballet — led to a meeting with famed cellist Yo-Yo Ma, and then to a new video with the cellist shot by director Spike Jonze.

That short film helped make Riley a viral-video and live-performance sensation, leading to work with Ellen DeGeneres, Stephen Colbert, Spike Lee and Wynton Marsalis. He's toured around the world with Cirque du Soleil and Madonna, and he performed during Madonna's 2012 Super Bowl halftime show. He's now based in Las Vegas, but he's mostly on the road, doing about 200 dates a year, he said.

Riley's success hasn't made him solitary, however. All the while, he has collaborated with longtime Memphis friends — like high-school pal and fellow jookin exemplar Ron "Prime Tyme" Myles — and with newfound allies, like dancer/choreographer Jon Boogz, co-founder with Lil Buck of Movement Art Is (MAI), an organization that wants to use "movement artistry to inspire change in the world," according to its website. (The video "Color of Reality" gives an example of the duo's dance ideas.)

"Dance hasn’t been given the proper platforms to reach its full potential artistically & educationally," the MAI site states.  Adds Riley: "People think of dancers as someone performing in the background, but we want to bring dance back to the prestige of Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire, Earl 'Snakehips' Tucker, the Nicholas Brothers. All those guys, you went to see them dance, and they weren't in the background. They would innovate. They created content."

Riley was born in Chicago, but his family — including five sisters and a younger brother — moved to Memphis when Charles — called "Chuck" at home — was about 5. Although the Rileys mostly lived in South Memphis, the family moved frequently, so Charles attended Riverview, Carver and Westwood before eventually settling in at the charter school Yo! Memphis Academy (now closed), which was devoted to the arts.

Riley originally aspired to be an artist, and was renowned among his peers for his perfect renderings of "Dragonball Z" characters and other anime heroes and critters. But by the time he reached high school, he was devoted to dance, inspired by the fun he had playing the King of Siam in a school production of "The King and I" and by the local jookin scene. He especially was blown away by the master jooker known as "Bobo," whom Lil Buck first encountered at the Crystal Palace skating rink on South Third: "He was just gliding across the carpet. He had those Jordans on, everybody was just super crunk around him. ... So smooth you couldn't even hear his feet. It was clean. It just stuck with me."

Soon, Riley was imitating Michael Jackson moves from old VHS tapes, perfecting his version of "the Harlem Shake," and watching Memphis jookin practitioners on the home-produced DVDs sold on the streets like bootlegs. (Lil Buck appeared on one such compilation himself, "Memphis Jookin Vol 1.")

At Yo! Memphis, Riley for the first time met "like-minded kids who really wanted to do something with their art," he said. "It was like everything just sped up and started making sense to me." At other schools, he said, "it's all about survival," but "this school just felt like a sanctuary."

Riley also became a scholarship student at New Ballet, where he learned techniques and exercises that enhanced and complemented his improvisational instincts. In collaboration with Smythe and other instructors, "I learned the elegance of ballet," he said. He began to realize that his initial dancing dreams were "too small."

"You're a product of your environment," he said. "For me, my dream was to be in a music video. That was as far as we knew to dream before I started getting exposed to all these other things."

Founded in 2001, New Ballet Ensemble & School is, according to its website, a nonprofit "artistic training" and "creative youth development organization focused on bringing together students from diverse backgrounds and providing a professional standard of dance training, regardless of ability to pay." Many young dancers participate almost daily in after-school programs and practices at the New Ballet headquarters at 2157 York in Midtown.

Obviously, Lil Buck is in demand by big employers willing to part with big bucks for his dance skills. But he still comes back for "Nut ReMix," he said, because "I just love doing this show."

He said returning to Memphis not only allows him to get reacquainted with Smythe and his other local friends, colleagues and family members, but it's also almost a necessity — a re-charging of what he calls his "spiritual" batteries.

"Jookin, it's a cultural dance," he said. "It started here. It's a bounce. It has a spirit that when you're away from Memphis, it's hard to generate. I do a lot of things, but I'm still a jooker. No matter what, I'll always be a jooker, so sometimes I need to come home to Memphis."

New Ballet Ensemble: 'Nut ReMix'

7:30 p.m. Friday, 5:30 p.m. Saturday and 2:30 p.m. Sunday. Cannon Center for the Performing Arts, 255 N. Main. Tickets: $15-$50. Visit ticketmaster.com, or call 1-800-745-3000 or 901-576-1269.