Nic Harrison remembers with haunting clarity the day he was brutally attacked in an alley.
It was Dec. 7. He was in Grade 5. Two kids, one of them a teenager, knocked him to the snowy ground and proceeded to kick him repeatedly with steel-toed work boots.
“They basically left me there for dead,” he says.
Sadly, this wasn’t the first time Harrison was beaten and it wouldn’t be the last. As an overweight child growing up in Prince George, Harrison says he was a favourite target for bullies — and not just school-aged bullies.
In his earlier years, he attended a Catholic school where he says he was the victim of physical and sexual abuse at the hands of his authority figures. Fearing God’s punishment, Harrison says he did not admit the abuse to his parents until one warm day when he could no longer hide the marks left on his skin from an electrical cord lashing.
“[My mother] made me put on a shirt and shorts one weekend and I was hesitant to do so, but when I finally did she saw the welts on my arms and legs from being whipped,” he says.
The truth came out. Harrison’s mother pulled him from the Catholic school in Grade 4 and enrolled him in a local public school. The sexual abuse ended there, he says, but he continued to be physically and emotionally bullied by his peers until well into his teens. Even so, that Dec. 7 attack did mark a turning point of sorts.
“When I recovered from that, my parents decided to put me into martial arts to learn how to defend myself because I never struck back, I would just take it.”
He started learning self-defense and karate. After high school, while studying drama at the London Academy of Performing Arts in England, he discovered kendo, a Japanese form of sword-fighting that allowed him to fulfill his childhood fantasy of being a light-saber-wielding Jedi, and became a member of the British kendo team.
Today Harrison is a professional stunt performer, fight director and director for theatre, film and TV. He is also a veteran improviser and teaches theatre at Capilano University.
Currently, Harrison is serving as fight director for Vancouver Opera’s world premiere of Stickboy, which runs until Nov. 7 at the Vancouver Playhouse. Composed by Neil Weisensel and with libretto by spoken-word artist Shane Koyczan, the opera tells Koyczan’s real-life story of being bullied in school.
Harrison jumped at the chance to be part of Stickboy. “This is the kind of show I would work on for free because I really believe in getting the message out about how kids are bullied,” he says.
As fight director, he is responsible for choreographing the violent and active moments in the story and, at Koyczan’s request, has given the simulated fights a realistic look.
“It actually makes it quite shocking when some of these moments happen,” he says.
Unlike Koyczan, who, after years of torment, says he himself turned into a bully, Harrison became withdrawn in his youth.
“When I was abused, instead of lashing out and becoming a bully myself, I completely turned inward and got into hiding within books and hiding within pop culture and things like that. That was my escape,” he says. “Because of the extent of the abuse that happened to me, and especially the sexual abuse, I think it made me more afraid of any kind of interaction with people, adults and children, so I isolated myself more.”
One pop culture phenomenon that Harrison credits with helping him survive school is the movie Star Wars. In fact, he describes just how the film influenced him in an essay published at starwarssavedmylife.wordpress.com.
Today, with two children of his own — a 12-year-old son (who has been practising martial arts since he was three) and an eight-year-old daughter — Harrison admits he can be an “overly cautious” parent because of his own past. But his wife keeps him in check, he says.
Although Stickboy is Koyczan’s autobiographical tale, Harrison believes the story will resonate with anyone who has ever been bullied, been a bully, or witnessed bullying — regardless of gender.
“Just because it’s a male character that this happened to, there’s no boundaries about the extent of bullying and how it affects people, male or female, so it’s something that I think everyone will be able to find a relation to one way or another.”
Stickboy runs until Nov. 7 at the Vancouver Playhouse. For tickets and details, go to vancouveropera.ca or call 604-683-0222.
