Stickboy brings back painful memories for fight director Nicholas Harrison

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      The bullying depicted in Vancouver Opera’s Stickboy has been hitting an emotional chord with the entire creative team—perhaps no one more so than the show’s fight choreographer, Nicholas Harrison.

      The successful actor, stunt performer, fight director, teacher, and father of two says that working on the show has been bringing back moments from his own traumatic childhood growing up in Prince George.

      “It really depends on the day,” he says before teaching a class at the theatre department at Capilano University. “Some days I’m totally fine and can detach myself. Other days something hits so close and similar to an event that happened to me.”

      A bullying scene in Stickboy, recounting an event where Koyczan was beaten with a hockey stick, brings back one specific, sport-related incident for Harrison. “I was short and very overweight as a child and the neighbourhood kids hated that I had won a 10-speed in a contest,” he recounts. He rode his beloved prize bike to a softball practice. “After the coach left, the kids destroyed my bike with stones and then beat me up with baseball bats,” he says with emotion that’s, understandably, still raw.

      Throughout his childhood, Harrison faced the double horror of being abused both by the teachers and priests at his Catholic school and by the neighbourhood kids. They are extremely painful memories that also encompass brutal sexual abuse by the school staff (recounted by him in a moving and well-researched essay at the Star Wars Saved My Life website), but ones he now realizes it’s better to face and speak out about. “I did want to forget about it for the longest time, but the more I kept walking away from it the more it kept coming back,” he says, explaining the worst thing he had to deal with in early adulthood as he worked through the experiences was the sense of his own guilt—a shame the priests once used to silence him.

      It was actually fighting, and martial arts, that helped heal Harrison, whose parents put him in karate at 11 to learn to protect himself after he was savagely beaten up and left bleeding in an alley. That led to studies in kendo and other forms, fighting professionally on the British kendo team, and then studying acting at the London Academy (and eventually getting his Ph.D in UBC’s theatre program). And that’s what’s led to his fight choreography for movies, TV, companies like Bard on the Beach and Vancouver Opera—and Stickboy itself.

      He’s very careful about how he stages the violence for this show, knowing it firsthand. “I do not like gratuitous violence; it really takes away from what an author’s trying to say,” he says. “But these are very raw fights that will trigger, ‘Yeah, I remember that,’ or ‘I knew a kid that that happened to,’ or ‘Yeah, I was that bully.’ ”

      But working on Stickboy is an opportunity he’d never miss out on, no matter what pain it brings back. “I felt like I needed to work on it,” he says. “It’s so important the opera is doing this show. Fifteen years ago, established companies would be afraid to put this on, but it’s nice to see the walls are coming down, as opposed to ‘Don’t talk about it.’”

      Follow Janet Smith on Twitter at @janetsmitharts.

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