Jookin with Lil Buck – Dance Workshop

December 13, 2016

I attended a free, fun dance workshop organized by USC Visions and Voices during the last week of classes. It was held in one of the dance studio rooms in the Glorya Kaufman school of dance.

Jookin Demo from Lil Buck at USC

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsV8eNyJIZ0

I learned about a style of street dancing, called jookin’, that became popular in Memphis, Tennessee in the late 1980s and ’90s from Lil Buck himself. Lil Buck is a famous, contemporary jookin’ artist who started his path to fame on YouTube for an amazing performance with Yo-Yo Ma. It has evolved into a dance form and one of its basic tenets is a constant bounce that the dancer maintains. Lil Buck also explained that it’s a confrontational street dance style where the defiant attitude of the dancer is expressed through the physical dance steps. The firstvideo shows Lil Buck performing a demo.

We learned a few steps and then put it together for a short snippet of a dance choreographed for a song in a specific style of hip-hop music. It wasn’t too difficult, surprisingly but putting it all together at the end was hard.

Locking Demo with Jon Boogz at USC

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IG-sDRgzyeU

In addition, Lil Buck had brought a fellow dancer, Jon Boogz (second video) and we were fortunate to get the chance to learn a few essential locking steps with him, including the body wave. It was a lot more precise than it looks and personally, I found it more difficult than jookin’.

Can’t wait to start practicing these steps over the holidays!

Published on December 13th, 2016

Last updated on August 29th, 2017


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