ANN ARBOR – It all began in 1989 when founder Christopher Barbeau decided to take a leap of faith and left his longtime job at the University of Michigan to open a facility dedicated to training combatant actors.
Barbeau, who goes by Maestro, has an impressive resume training actors in major Hollywood productions including "Hook," Disney's "The Three Musketeers" and "Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World."
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"I was (also) a stunt driver in 'The Blues Brothers,'" Barbeau said. "There were over 100 of us and I was in the Chicago unit. I never got to meet anybody cool or drive the Bluesmobile, but I did get to wreck two cars and, even now, with Blue-ray (Disc), I can tell which car I’m in."
He is currently the fight director for the Michigan Opera Theatre and the Toledo Opera. Barbeau estimates he has choreographed 600 stage shows throughout his career.
(Above: Photo/Meredith Bruckner)
Why the name Ring of Steel?
"Well, that’s of course, the double entendre -- the sound the sword makes as well as a ring of friends who are working together to create these stories we tell through the action," he said.
The summer season is the busiest for Ring of Steel, which puts on 10-12 shows at festivals and events throughout the area, such as the Motor City Irish Festival, the Saline Celtic Festival and the Ypsilanti Heritage Festival. All of its actors are volunteers.
"This is no one’s source of income," said managing director and Maestro's wife, Diane Barbeau. "It’s for socialization and keeping fit and learning the cool stuff we would want to do anyway."
(Above) A fight scene during one of the troupe's summer shows. Photo/Ring of Steel
Diane Barbeau said that anyone is welcome to walk in and join the troupe, but that the winter offseason months are the best time to join since more attention can be given to new students when instructors aren't rehearsing for shows.
So, who comes to Ring of Steel?
"There’s a huge variety of people," she said. "If I just look around the room, we have people who work at University Hospital, a personal trainer, a water engineering person, a professional translator of technical patents. One works at a music warehouse, two people in high school over there, works at a Starbucks over there. We’ve had engineers and dancers."
Diane Barbeau is an instructor who offers a variety of yoga and strengthening classes at the facility. When I arrived early before the interview, she was suspended in the air during an aerial silk lesson.
Besides yoga, Ring of Steel offers several classes and workshops for the public, and the most popular is the annual summer camp.
"That runs four separate weeks through June, July and August," she said.
(Photo: Ring of Steel)
(Above: Photo/Ring of Steel)
"It’s a day camp that goes Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. And in that week, they will learn sword fighting, star and knife throwing, whip cracking, archery, high falls, mini-trampoline. They’ll do some atmospheric effects. They’ll do makeup effects -- how to do a black eye or a bloody wound. They love that. We’ll teaching basic rules for what not to hit with foam swords and then they go outside and hit each other and it’s a lot of fun."
During our interview, members arrived and began the evening with swordplay footwork sequences conducted by Barbeau.
(Above: Photo/Meredith Bruckner)
Barbeau said, first and foremost, safety is the No. 1 concern at Ring of Steel. With a third-degree black belt in Akito and a second-degree black belt in jiujitsu, Barbeau approaches training from his unique martial arts perspective and an appreciation for historical techniques.
"We’re not using real techniques because real techniques means the sword ends up in the other guy," he said. "It turns out badly for everyone when that happens on the set or on stage. In fact, we do know a lot of those historical techniques and we will take aspects of them and that makes us different as well. We’re not just pure stage combatants; we do know the real technique."
As I tiptoed around the mats to take pictures of pairs as they practiced fight sequences, several members told me not to worry. Since they perform in crowded festivals, they have to adapt to members of the public occasionally wandering into their performances by mistake.
(Above: Photo/Meredith Bruckner)
"If you notice, they’re wearing t-shirts. There’s no armor. There are no face masks. There are no rubber tips on the swords," he said. "The only thing that protects them is the technique. So they have to master the techniques to be safe."
At the end of our interview, Barbeau shared a story about the current director at the Michigan Opera Theatre, who is from New York.
"He’s conducted albums for Pavarotti. He is a major name. He’s conducted the Met," Barbeau said. "He comes here and we are doing 'Otello,' which has a big mass fight."
The director decided to hire Ring of Steel to perform the fight sequences, but there was one major problem: It was during the middle of a semester and Barbeau's college-aged actors could not do the job.
(Above) Barbeau's teenage sons are members of the troupe (Photo/Meredith Bruckner)
"So I bring in 10 of my high school students, and the maestro, he’s watching, and he stopped even looking at his orchestra," said Barbeau. "He’s just watching what’s going on up there and, afterward, he came up to me and told me, 'I want to take all your people out to lunch after the rehearsal.' He took them out and said, 'I can’t believe that in Ann Arbor, I’m looking at fights that are better than fights that I’m seeing on stage in New York.'"
To learn more about Ring of Steel, visit its website.