OUR TENTH SEASON IS UNDER WAY!
Welcome to Big Picture Theatre!
I’m Roger Harrison, instructor to a wonderful group of students now in our 10th year! I’ve written and performed in plays, tv shows, music videos, worked on movies and commercials, and served the Canadian, US, British and other military forces primarily as a field director of civilians in the battlespace for live immersion training.
I run the entire program myself. I design the curriculum, plan the schedule, create most of the games and lessons and of course teach the classes. I design the Showcase posters and shirts, book theatre tours for the students, and promote and produce the annual end-of-season Showcase production. I do have some wonderful parent volunteers who come out of the woodwork to lend a hand as Showcase approaches, and for that I’m eternally grateful. It’s an enormous commitment of time and energy to run a program alone, but it’s worth it. I like having complete creative control over the curriculum.
This is mostly because I don’t take the common approach to theatre education.
Theatre does teach life and workplace skills. In fact, it’s a better preparation for the workplace than most business courses. The reason for this is because business will teach you about numbers, but people are what makes money go around, and a business education doesn’t necessarily teach you about people. Theatre, on the other hand does. For a further discussion on what this means, click here.
The way I teach gets to the heart of the matter of why it is that people are afraid and have difficulty on stage or speaking in public. And I don’t believe that common explanations – mostly consisting of evolutionary psychology arguments which suggest that we fear ostracization from a group – are on the right track.
Basically, it’s about the difficulty to be ourselves most people experience when they’re at the center of attention. But that originality is the only way an actor can ever bring their own ingenuity to a character, and I work hard to bring it out.
I can be reached anytime: info@bigpicturetheatre.ca
WITHOUT THESE SPONSORS THERE WOULD BE NO JUNIOR PLAYERS! Thank you to each and every one of you!
