Lost lyircs --Program mentioned in TORONTO SUN

[Logikal Ethix]

Every Monday and Wednesday at the Oakdale Community Centre on Grandravine Dr. in the Jane-Finch community, youths between the ages of 11 and 14 get together for the Lost Lyrics Alternative Education Through Hip Hop After-school Program.

According to the program's mission statement: "Lost Lyrics is an alternative educational program which uses hip-hop culture as a base to understanding self-identity and the complexities surrounding young individuals in stigmatized communities."

Hip-hop culture is also used as a means to help understand the same complexities among young people in the feature film How She Move.

The movie is about a young high school student forced to leave her private school and return to her old, crime-filled neighbourhood where she rekindles a passion for the competitive world of step-dancing.

Rutina Wesley stars as Raya Green, the young high school student who returns to her old Jane-Finch neighbourhood. Raya is the descendant of Caribbean immigrants, whose mother, Fay, warns her of the dangers of pursuing dance over her education.

Fay is played by Toronto actor Melanie Nicholls-King, who grew up in Flemingdon Park (also a stigmatized Toronto community) near Don Mills Rd. and Eglinton Ave.

Nicholls-King says it wasn't a tough stretch for her to play the role of Raya's mother in the film.

"I grew up in a West Indian family and my parents never wanted me to be an actor," she says on the phone from her home in New York City. "I was supposed to be a teacher, a nurse or a doctor, but I enjoyed acting.

"My parents used to say to me, 'Acting is not a career choice, it's something you do on the side for fun.' So all I had to do to play Raya's mom in the movie was to act like my own mother, except substitute acting for dancing."

Nicholls-King did try to please her parents and went to the University of Windsor, but after a year she decided to follow her dreams and went to the Vancouver Playhouse Acting School.

"I didn't want to end up in a situation where I was looking back at my life and never gave acting a try," says Nicholls-King, who has found steady work on TV and in film since 1992, including a recurring role in the critically acclaimed cable series The Wire, and the award-winning Canadian dramatic series Traders.

"Acting moves me in a way nothing else does. It scares me but I love the visceral reaction you get from it."

Nicholls-King first experienced that reaction when she was 10 years old. Her Grade 5 teacher was directing the Wizard Of Oz and Nicholls-King and some of her classmates decided to go to the auditions.

"We had no idea what we were doing. We only went down their because of our teacher," she says. "She asked us to sing and I sang Happy Birthday, and she gave me the role of the Wicked Witch of the West.

"The singing and dancing was fun and I remember not being scared on stage. And I loved the applause. It was so loud I couldn't even speak."

Another thing Nicholls-King enjoys about her acting career is that a lot of the productions she's in are filmed here in Toronto, where her parents still live, so she gets to visit them often.

But what drew her to How She Move -- aside from what she calls a strong script -- was that not only was the movie filmed in Toronto but it was about a real community in the city.

"It was a Toronto production that wasn't trying to be somewhere else," Nicholls-King says. "Plus there was this real Caribbean theme to the movie that was wonderful for me to be able to access. It was just me being me.

"And it was also good to see that not everything coming out of Jane and Finch has to be bad."

How She Move is in theatres across the GTA.

Melanie Nicholls-King plays a mom in the local film How She Move. "Not everything coming out of Jane and Finch has to be bad," she says.


taken from http://www.torontosun.com/News/TorontoAndGTA/2008/01/28/4797569-sun.html
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