NEW YORK, NY.- Dancers sometimes talk about finding the pocket — a kind of flow state where rhythm and movement are so perfectly married that the dancing is not just on the music, but in it.

Choreographer and dancer Shay Latukolan lives in the pocket. His deceptively simple dances have an effortless groove, yet attend to every detail of the pop hooks they’re often built for. And like those hooks, they get stuck in your head.

That catchiness acts as a lure in rapper Childish Gambino’s “Little Foot Big Foot” video, released this month. Latukolan’s choreography blends old-school Nicholas Brothers-style showmanship with TikTok dance vocabulary, an irresistible mix. Its charm makes the video’s dark second-act twist — a signature move for Gambino (alter ego of actor Donald Glover) — all the more shocking.

The tone is lighter but the dance imagery is just as vivid in the electronic band Jungle’s “Back on 74,” the video that earned Latukolan worldwide recognition when it went mega-viral last summer. Part of Jungle’s “Volcano,” an album also available as a motion picture, it features a cast of phenomenal dancers. Latukolan’s infectious choreography, with its silken “Soul Train” funk, makes full use of their considerable skill. Yet it was accessible enough that a chunk of social media started dancing along. The dance in “Little Foot Big Foot” has a similar pull: Monyett Crump Jr., a performer in the video, said even the extras on set were determined to learn it.

“That’s what’s really cool about what he does,” said Joshua Lloyd-Watson of Jungle, known professionally as J Lloyd. “He makes everybody want to do it, and believe they can do it. I certainly don’t dance, but I think I can, when I watch the videos.”

Latukolan, 31, may be behind multiple viral sensations, but he has little interest in generating social media buzz. “The TikTok generation, I have no idea what that is about,” he said, laughing. And he’s not caught up in the churn of the commercial music industry. After a brief time in Los Angeles, he now lives in Amsterdam, not far from where he grew up, and closer to the European art scenes that frequently inspire him.

“The music we get exposed to over here, the dance we get exposed to — I think that helps me come from a high art perspective, from a more theatrical perspective,” he said in a video interview. “I didn’t want to be the usual LA choreographer working for LA artists. I missed this different artistic energy I feel here, which seems more authentic to me.”

That focus on authenticity has, in turn, made him only more popular in a social media culture with little patience for phonies. Although he says he doesn’t understand TikTok, his account has more than 172,000 followers.

Latukolan was raised in a quiet Dutch town, finding solace and color in dance and movies. “I was just a kid on the street, dancing with the other kids I grew up with,” he said. From an early age he was making no-budget dance films with his friends, honing his freestyle skills and learning how to create choreography that could move with the camera. “Dance and film, both are moving images,” he said, “so they felt connected to me.”

In his 20s, he began to earn music-industry jobs, collaborating with British rapper Stormzy, Spanish pop star Rosalía and singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran. The Jungle project came along in a roundabout way. The band hired two of Latukolan’s good friends, Roché Apinsa and Ruben Chi, to choreograph a song from the “Volcano” album, “Good Times / Problemz.” Since Apinsa and Chi were also dancing in the video, they brought in Latukolan as a movement director. J Lloyd and the director, Charlie Di Placido, were so impressed with Latukolan’s inventive and quietly authoritative work that they asked him to choreograph the rest of the “Volcano” project.

It was a daunting task: a motion picture made up of more than a dozen music videos, each shot as a single take, the whole thing filmed over just a few days. Latukolan, a longtime Jungle fan, took to it with enthusiasm, rapidly creating detailed and impeccably musical sequences.

“I think a lot of choreographers just worry about tempo, just about snapping things really tight,” Di Placido said, “but you can tell that Shay listens to the music as a complete soundscape.”

Latukolan’s nimble thinking also became an important asset on the “Little Foot Big Foot” set. Originally, Latukolan said, he was to rehearse with Glover — one of his idols — for multiple weeks. But scheduling complications meant they had only four days together, for a video that runs more than six minutes.

Crump said Latukolan’s experience coming up as a freestyle dancer helps him adapt on the fly. He’s accustomed to improvising, going with the flow both creatively and logistically.

“What’s dope about Shay is that he comes from a community background, not an industry background, so being in the room with him is a little more pure and raw,” said Crump, who has also worked with Latukolan on projects for R&B singer Tinashe. “Having that freestyle side, the movement comes really fast, and it’s naturally more eclectic.”

Online commenters see all kinds of influences in Latukolan’s dances. Choreographer Bob Fosse comes up often. The swinging hips and 1970s bounce of “Volcano” seem right out of the Fosse playbook. The dancing trio in “Little Foot Big Foot” appears to echo Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It),” itself inspired by Fosse’s “Mexican Breakfast.”

Latukolan is flattered by the comparison — and says Fosse’s not not an influence (though he knows his work mostly through Michael Jackson, who frequently quoted Fosse). But Latukolan is typically less deliberate with his references. He’s more of a free-associative collagist, following where the music leads, mixing steps that span genres and time periods to create dance that feels both familiar and new. “The way the storytelling comes about, it comes from a very childlike state,” he said.

He often lets a performer’s natural tendencies shape the choreography, especially when working with an artist like Glover, who is “low-key a great dancer,” Crump said. The hand-waving gesture in “Little Foot Big Foot” that fans on social media connected to “Single Ladies” is actually a Gloverism. In “Guava Island,” Glover’s 2019 movie musical, “he was doing it all the time,” Latukolan said, laughing.

Latukolan seems to inspire loyalty in his collaborators, an unusual thing in the musical-chairs commercial industry. Crump calls him “one of those people you drop everything to work with.” Glover’s tightly edited page on the social platform X features fewer than 20 posts, but one of them is a tribute to Latukolan. Di Placido said that when it comes to Jungle projects, Latukolan is “basically part of the furniture now.”

The dedication is mutual. “No shade to people who want to make TikToks and go viral,” Latukolan said, “but the people I love to work with and have been lucky to work with are people who are invested in going a little deeper, making something beautiful, something special.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.