In “Nobody Knows,” the jookin star presents a short film that explores his struggles as a Black man and his relationship to dance.
Lil Buck, the willowy dancer who spins on the toes of his sneakers as if they were point shoes, was a little boy — probably around 6 — when a church choir filled him with such spirit that he got up and began to dance. “I don’t even know if it could be called dancing, but I just jumped up and started moving around because I felt it so much,” he said in a recent interview from Los Angeles, where he lives. “There’s something about it that just hit me. My mom was like, ‘Oh my God, my son’s got the Holy Ghost!’” Buck, or Charles Riley, rediscovers the fervor of that moment in a short film, “Nobody Knows”— live this week on his YouTube channel — set to Pastor T.L. Barrett and the Youth for Christ Choir’s version of the gospel song. The video, directed by David Javier, takes place in a moody, shadowy church where the voices of a choir propel Buck to contemplate his struggles as a Black man. Fueling it all is the emotion that drives his magnetic dancing. There is struggle and pain, joy and healing, and ultimately, a transformation. And throughout, the Black Lives Matter movement informs his dancing, too — a root connecting the past to the present. “We all have seen what the Black community has been going through,” he said. “This is sadly nothing new for me and where I’m from and my culture. So it just meant a lot to me to be able to speak through movement and tell this story through my own eyes and in my own experience of it and my own feelings.” Buck grew up to become a star of jookin, a street dance form native to Memphis, where Buck was raised.
