Moving Star and the Mentor

 

The thrust of this video documentary is a ten-year, inter-racial mentoring relationship between a talented black youth and an older white professional photographer. It culminates in the rise of a young star dancer, a father-son-like relationship and a creative collaboration in stunning and thought-provoking photographs.

 

The story begins with field trips in a Kids-with-Cameras mentoring program and the youth's residency in public housing and on a poverty road on rural John's Island. It proceeds through academic struggles, an absent father and loving but disabled mother, endless residential relocations, trips to art museums and galleries, summer art programs, art exhibits and awards, and a teen's emerging love of dance and successful graduation from the School of Arts. It includes the youth's brushing shoulders with the nation's top hip hop choreographer, Rennie Harris. The story concludes in present time, as this nineteen year old builds a career in dance and dance instruction and prepares to find his way to a big city with his mentor's guidance and help.  

 

Through out the story, dramatic and innovative hip hop dancing is featured, in front of colorful urban murals and Charleston's black history settings, to both contemporary music and old Gullah Gospel songs. The more original meaning of this dance style as resistance, rebellion, liberation and freedom is given renewed significance as this youth uses it for achieving identity, releasing himself from dark inner forces, and artistically creating new steps and choreographies. Intertwined in this story is the role of the mentor in giving a base of attention, encouragement, emotional support, advocacy and entree to additional mentors, community activities and scholarship workshops.  

The story also dips into the youth's colorful ancestry and the mentor's social activism in the 1960's.  The youth's creativity is in the spirit of his ancestors, principally his great-grandmother Janie Hunter, who was a famed John's Island story teller and leader of the Moving Star Praise House choir.  The mentor was a social activist in civil rights and anti-poverty programs and visited John's Island in the 1960's.

 

Unknowingly, it was there that he met the relatives of the youth he would mentor forty years later...and the Moving Star and the Mentor was created.