In her essay “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle The Master’s House”, Radical Black lesbian poet and essayist Audre Lorde writes “Difference must not be merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic.” This sentiment perhaps best encapsulates the thesis of James Hinton’s short documentary Movement Spirit. Produced for the National Endowment for the Arts, Movement Spirit describes the importance of dance as an expression of creativity spanning geographic, racial, and cultural divides. The documentary highlights numerous NEA funded dance projects in Texas and Tennessee

The repeated emphasis of the film lies on the importance of the “neighborhood” in developing distinct styles of dance. As viewers, we are certainly meant to understand the neighborhood as a geographic area containing a community of people. However, we are also urged continually throughout the film to understand whichever borders delineate a “neighborhood” as representative of the lines, racial, geographic, class, ideological, that on the surface divide us but, as the film argues, are necessary and welcome in their creation of unique and beautiful forms of movement. 

As the film cycles through numerous forms of dance, the focus lies on what differentiates them: dress, music, style of movement, and most noticeably, the skin color of the dancers themselves. This juxtaposition of numerous forms of dance is integral to the film’s mission. The documentary, like the art of dance that it seeks to describe, serves as a neutral space, not tied to one specific community, but rather functioning as a thread tying them together, a forum within which their differences and similarities and individual beauties can be explored from a baseline of equality. As Lorde writes in a later essay, “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference,” “the need for unity is often misnamed as a need for homogeneity.” This sentiment pervades Hinton’s work. Dance as a unified form of expression is shown to the viewer to be brilliant because rather than in spite of differences among its devotees. This idea reflects the NEA’s mission to promote artistic excellence across cultures, and is expressed exquisitely through Hinton’s cinematography that captures the intrinsic beauty of each form of dance.