To promote cultural awareness between the United States and China, the Asia Society recently began a series of artistic exchanges in which performers from each country visited the other to put on a show. If it sounds like old-school diplomacy, that’s because it is. The first such delegation arrived in Beijing in November 2011, under the guidance of Orville Schell, a veteran journalist and observer of China who is now director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society. That delegation had names familiar to anyone steeped in American high culture and popular culture of recent decades: Yo-Yo Ma, Meryl Streep, Joel Coen, Damien Woetzel, Alice Waters and Amy Tan all seized the chance to engage with Chinese counterparts and foreigners in the city.
Rob Bennett for The New York Times Ole Schell in 2008.There was a younger face in that crowd. Charles Riley, better known as Lil Buck, then age 23, brought his remarkable style of dancing, called jookin’, from the streets of Memphis to Beijing. Lil Buck and Yo-Yo Ma did an impromptu performance for Liu Yandong, China’s highest-ranking female politician. At the end of the four-day affair, Lil Buck took part in a more ambitious event at the National Center for! the Performing Arts, the glittering egg-shaped space west of Tiananmen Square.
Following Lil Buck every step of the way in China was Ole Schell, the son of Orville Schell and a video producer. He made a short film on Lil Buck’s time in Beijing that has recently been posted to ChinaFile, an online publication of the Asia Society. The film got the attention of Stephen Colbert, who interviewed Lil Buck on Feb. 21. Lil Buck will perform in two shows at Le Poisson Rouge on April 2, along with Yo-Yo Ma,Brooklyn Rider and others.
I asked Ole Schell about the making of the film. Below is an edited transcript of the conversation.
How did you first hear about Lil Buck, and what gave you the idea to make a short film that higlights his performance
I live in New York and was in Central Park watching Yo-Yo Ma perform with a group of kids from Harlem for a summer concert series. Towards the end of the show, this young guy named Lil Buck came out and stole the show. He did a dance routine unlike anything I had ever seen. He looked like a computer-animated plastic Gumby doll as he moved. One second he was slow and fluid like water, and the next he was precise and lightening-fast like a prizefighter.
To me, his style looked like something totally new and served as a stark contrast to both the classical cello and the renowned cellist behind him. I later learned Lil Buck is from Memphis and his style is called “jookin’.†Trying to describe Lil Buck’s jookin’ is nearly impossible. It really needs to be witnessed first-hand or at least on film.
As a child, my dad would return from trips to China with Mao hats, cricket cages and other little-boy ! treasures! like swords and scrolls for me. I then traveled to China for the first time as a boy in 1987. Beijing was teeming with bikes then instead of cars, and many people were still wearing official Mao suits. I have traveled there often over the years and seen first-hand how fast China and its youth culture have been Westernizing.
So when the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society in New York was organizing an event in Beijing bringing Western filmmakers, artists, writers, journalists, actors and musicians together for four days to interact with their Chinese counterparts, I saw a great opportunity. People like Joel Coen, Amy Tan, Alice Waters, Michael Pollan and Meryl Streep were to have discussions and hold events with the likes of Chinese actors Liu Ye, Ge You and a host of others. It was to be called the U.S.-China Forum on the Arts and Culture. There were to be screenings, panel discussions, a dinner at the embassy prepared by Alice Waters and then finally a concert put on at the National Prforming Arts Center to include Yo-Yo Ma and Meryl Streep. The forum had so many accomplished guests, but to me they didn’t have anyone as young and cool as Lil Buck, so why not bring this hip-hop wunderkind, film it and turn the whole thing upside-down
We urged that Lil Buck be included to add a little spice to the whole affair. From there, I went to Los Angeles where Lil Buck was then living and decided to document his journey to China for this short doc.
What were the challenges of making a film about this kind of performance
The main goal was to create a cultural contrast and see what happened. Lil Buck couldn’t have been more different than the people we would see on the street.
Having grown up in the United States, I could more or less get Lil Buck, but the real question was how would your average Chinese person react
Nobody in Lil Buck’s family had ever left the United States, so I was curious to expe! rience Ch! ina through his unadulterated eyes.
We took him to one of the last giant images of Mao Zedong, on the rostrum at the entrance of the Forbidden City. We were surrounded by the image of Mao, the Forbidden City in front of us, and Tiananmen Square behind us - the heart of the dragon, if you will. Lil Buck started to dance below Mao, and we were very quickly shut down by a grim-faced security detail. From there we migrated inside Tiananmen Square, where Lil Buck did something I can only describe as a frontwards moon-walk on ice through a crowd of elderly Chinese tourists all wearing the same hats and T-shirts so they wouldn’t get lost. They looked confounded and perplexed and stared at Lil Buck like he was an alien.
We generally would find a cool location like the Great Wall or Rem Koolhaas’s CCTV building and shoot Buck dancing until we got shut down. We woul often draw a crowd and sometimes the ire of the authorities. Overall, the people and even police were intrigued and good-natured about it.
Andrea Mohin/The New York Times Lil Buck onstage in New York in 2011.What did you want to say about China and Lil Buck’s relationship with China through this film
On the one hand, you go into these situations blind, but on the other you try to set things up in a such a way that hopefully creates compelling moments. I am not sure I had a message I wanted to convey. I really saw this as an exercise in juxtaposition, and the worlds coming together couldn’t have been more disparate.
There is a real generational di! vide in C! hina. The younger people got Lil Buck more easily. Many of that generation are very savvy and even listen to the same music Lil Buck might dance to. The nightclub industry is booming in China, and any of them will play the latest rap songs from the United States. Kids who grew up in the ‘90’s or 2000’s got Lil Buck and often wanted to have their picture taken with him. The older people had a whole different perspective. For those who lived through the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution or even the devastation of the Great Leap Forward, Lil Buck must have appeared to have landed from another planet. For people born much after Deng Xiaoping’s reform, however, all that tumult is ancient history.
In trying to bridge the East-West divide, we included a soundtrack from both sides of the world. The track in the beginning and end of the film is called “Blowin Up My Phone†by Young Jai, a Memphis rapper getting radio play in the south. (He is lso Lil Buck’s brother). We included the tracks “Aisha†and “Made in China†from Beijing rapper Young Kin in the Great Wall scene, among others, and then included the haunting music of famed Chinese musician Wu Tong, who performed on an ancient instrument made from a gourd called a sheng. Contrast that with several live performances by Yo-Yo Ma and Brooklyn Rider, a New York-based string quartet, and we hope the film has a well-rounded soundtrack.
What were the most surprising aspects of Lil Buck’s encounters with China or with Chinese whom he met
The final culmination of the China trip was a concert put on in the National Performing Arts Center, the most prestigious concert hall in China. It was curated by! Yo-Yo Ma! and the former principal dancer in the New York City Ballet, Damien Woetzel.
There was a moment towards the end of the concert when Lil Buck got up and did an improvised number that just about set the place on fire. The concert included so many internationally recognized musicians and dancers in a relatively formal setting, and along came Lil Buck with his street swag and Air Jordans and blew people’s minds. The theater was filled with an array of Chinese officials (including a member of the Politburo), Western sponsors of the forum and classical music enthusiasts. I doubt many in the crowd had caught even the faintest sniff of hip-hop culture.
Lil Buck was at his best and closed the show to a rousing standing ovation. It was there that I fully appreciated his physical genius and immense talent. In front of a packed house of Beijing glitterati including the American ambassador, and flanked by the greatest living cellist and Meryl Streep, he got up and tore out a totally impromptu performance uring the grand finale of Yo-Yo Ma and Brooklyn Rider’s performance of “Ascending Bird.†He without question stole the show.
I even heard second-hand that Meryl Streep had called it the best night of her life.
What did you hope to capture in the film about Lil Buck’s relationship with the other performers who were on the cultural trip
Lil Buck was certainly cut from a different cloth than the rest of the performers, and that was part of the appeal of filming him there. Most of the other performers were much older and certainly not of the hip-hop generation. Lil Buck has a certain street cred to him but can also roll with the punches in almost any setting. To me, he was the final ingredient in a successful forum. Lil Buck had already had a relationship with Yo-Yo Ma, so I obviously wanted to capture that. But I also was curious to see what would happen when he interacted or performed with Brooklyn Rider or Meryl Streep! . I deci! ded to structure the film in a way that would show his journey from living in his grandmother’s Memphis basement to traveling to Beijing to perform with a duo as accomplished as Meryl Streep and Yo-Yo Ma.
I suppose I saw Lil Buck’s journey as the ultimate American dream, albeit realized in China.
I’m now happy to call Lil Buck a friend.
