Way back in 2011 – that’s ancient in internet terms – Memphis street dancer Charles Riley, aka Lil Buck, went viral in an unlikely partnership with cellist Yo-Yo Ma, dancing to Saint-Saëns’ The Swan. Buck’s dance, a style of footwork called jookin, sees him glide across the floor with boneless grace, walking on air. Unlike a lot of hip-hop and street dance (and contemporary dance too), which is heavily rooted to the earth, jookin goes the way of ballet, sidelining gravity.

Buck’s career since has seen him dancing with Madonna, Alicia Keys and Mikhail Baryshnikov; he’s worked with Versace, Spike Lee and Cirque du Soleil. Now his latest collab is with Oxford University, where he was invited to be a visiting fellow at the new Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities, built with a £185m donation from US private equity billionaire and Trump donor Stephen Schwarzman, whose portrait hangs at the entrance of what’s an impressively vast and light space with a concert hall, two theatres, gallery and cinema. It also houses a range of the university’s humanities faculties and the new Institute for Ethics in AI, the idea being that these disciplines might work together and close gaps between academics and artistic practitioners.

When it comes to ethics, there have been questions over the acceptance of Schwarzman’s funds, as well as the matter of adding yet more privilege to Britain’s richest university. Of course it’s wonderful for those lucky enough to benefit, and for dance, sometimes stuck in its own silo, being part of a conversation with other disciplines is essential to staying relevant in the outside world.

Lil Buck’s tenure gives an idea of what that conversation can look like. He’s worked on a history of jookin as a specific Memphis dance form, and with historians at St Hilda’s College, bringing together ideas about 21st-century street dance and 18th-century historical dance. He gave a presentation on the significance of shoe and trainer design in the development of street dance, while classics scholar Kathleen Riley lectured on the synergies between Lil Buck and Fred Astaire (you can 100% see where she’s coming from). The most visible result is a performance, 1776, a collaboration with two excellent youth dance companies, ZooNation and Oxford’s Body Politic, looking back to the founding of the United States 250 years ago, the constitutional idea that “all men are created equal” and what independence and freedom really meant for its citizens then and, perhaps, now.

In Buck’s telling, equality was “a broken promise”. Freedom for some meant oppression and conformism for others (hard to argue with when slavery was still in place; still relevant under the current administration). Authoritarian figures in frock coats rule over subjects locked into tightly choreographed uniformity – much of hip-hop dance is built on visible control, the isolation of certain body parts, in pops and freezes, while others are straitjacketed, it perfectly tells the story.

But you can’t keep spirit and rhythm down, a spark will always emerge, individuality wins out, and a looser, more fluid feel rips through the dancers, expelling demons with vibrant style and steps from locking, waacking, krump and more (ZooNation’s Dannielle “Rhimes” Lecointe is co-choreographer). Buck generously gives the stage to his talented young charges – leading dancer Andrew Jackson’s moves are combustible – but when he appears himself he is masterful, sweeping across the room, suspended poses suddenly materialising, doing what all great dancers do, which is make you feel you are in completely safe hands.

Debates over the knotty morality of arts funding are ongoing, but the value of a project like this one is clear. The most heart-lifting part of 1776 comes at the curtain call, where all the young dancers form a circle and everyone gets a solo, Buck cheering them on. The joy and camaraderie is full to bursting; it’s true freedom in movement.