Here, the dancer Lil Buck, or Charles Riley, performs his now-classic adaptation of “The Swan,” a collaboration with his ballet teacher, Katie Smythe; it’s set to “The Dying Swan,” a solo made famous by Anna Pavlova:

This eloquent combination of jookin’ — a Memphis-born style that relies heavily on footwork and comes from the Gangsta Walk — and Camille Saint-Saëns’s wistful strings gives the sensation that Buck is levitating.

Jookin’ is about having total control of the body and that is evident as he suddenly pops up. First shown sitting on the floor, with his body folded over, and knees crossed in front of his torso, Buck rises with one rippling arm and then the other.

He isolates and speeds his arms and prepares to take flight. Before spinning on a knee in one direction and then on his toes in the other, he fixates on other parts of his body — first his arms, then fingertips, legs and finally his toes — and ascends.

Gliding and toe work are important components of jookin’. Buck studied ballet for more than two years, but his foot flexibility is mainly due to an accident in fourth grade, when his ankle snapped all the way back. A similar injury occurred again at 18; a few months later, while stretching, his ankle popped. The next day, to his surprise, he found that his ankles were bouncy and loose.

This sequence shows that otherworldly flexibility as he travels down to the floor on one pointed sneaker and back up:

With his toes tightly crossed he spins quickly, rotating from one toe to the other as if his sneakers are point shoes.

Watch as he presses — precariously — the inner edge of his right foot into the floor; at the same time he rises, turning until he’s completely balanced on the tip.

In an instant, you see it all: his agility, his articulation and his profound control.

Suddenly Buck melts onto his knees and rotates on them, all the while maintaining a loose bounce in his upper body.

That momentum is what lifts him into a brief handstand, but his dismount is where he shows his finesse: By softly landing on his toes, he keeps walking. The music, or the groove, stays in his body and here you can see his subtle fluidity.

While the dance began with a recognizable swan pose — a bow then rippling arms or wings — in this final moment, Buck flips everything around and creates a vastly different image with the help of extreme contortions.

Lying on his stomach, he pulls one foot over his shoulder and watches it as it inches along — heel-toe, heel-toe, staring at it in amazement — and pivots his body sideways. He ducks underneath it so that it passes over his head and then bends his other knee and grabs that foot.

This is the dying swan, via jookin’. It may not be ballet-pretty, but it has wit and ingenuity. Buck hasn’t died like Pavlova’s swan —

— instead, he’s tied himself up into a human bow.