Go back a few hundred years and the future of France is in the balance...Crafty Cardinal Richelieu is plotting against Queen Anne but musketeers Athos, Porthos and Aramis have vowed to protect their country. However, as anyone familiar with the book or the many films knows, there are in fact four loyal soldiers. To complicate matters further our hero, D'Artagnan, is falling in love! David Nixon, who has choreographed this new production for Northern Ballet Theatre, explains what drew him to the story: "Firstly, the opportunity to work with different collaborators stimulates something new in our work. Also, the action-orientated plot is beautifully simple and a perfect vehicle to develop new techniques with our male dancers in some truly exciting fighting scenes."
 | | 'The dancers have fantastic muscle memory.' |
One very important collaborator has been fight director Renny Krupinski who has been bringing realistic fight scenes to stage and screen for a number of years as well as continuing with his award-winning career as actor, writer and director. He is probably best known to TV audiences as Brookside villain Sizzler. This is the first time Renny has worked in ballet but it's certainly something he can't wait to repeat: "This is an extraordinary experience because the dancers have a fantastic muscle memory. You show it to them once, maybe twice, and they've got it, but, working with actors you spend ages going over small details and moves and after a while they get the rough idea. The working process here is very different." But what exactly does a fight arranger do? For Renny there is a certain similarity with dance: "I arrange the fights, I choreograph violence. It's a strange job doing simulated violence round the country but this is what I do. I make it safe, I make it realistic, I make it work in the context of a production so it's not just coming in and doing a punch-up. It actually has to be choreographed and I have to say I never thought there would be as much demand for someone who does what I do but I never really seem to stop working which is good." Certainly The Three Musketeers is a story that can't be told without a bit of stage fighting. Renny says: "I think an audience coming to see The Three Musketeers expects there to be fighting and that's what we've given them. The dancers really have their work cut out but it's not a fight from start to finish, there's a lot of really beautiful ballet in there. It's never been done as a ballet before, and that's very exciting, but there are definitely major group fights with everybody fighting each other so there's a lot to deal with. | "I have to say I've never had a fight in my life and I don't want one." | | Renny Krupinski |
"I have to say David [Nixon] and I had no real idea how this was going to work and we didn't know if he was going to choreograph ballet and I was going to put fights in there orÌýI was going to choreograph fights and he was going to put some ballet moves in but it's not worked like that at all. I work with the music, I work with the dancers and we've created a fight that works with the characters. I asked the dancers, 'what do you think you can do?' and they've given me fantastic leaps and jumps and have really brought the ballet into the fight. We presented it to David and he liked it. "You find when you are working with music you haven't got enough fight so you have to put more in. You've got the perfect ending and find you've got to insert bits in the middle. I suppose it's like kneading a bit of bread - you eventually shape it and present it." For most of us dancing and sword-fighting at the same time would be something of an impossibility. For Renny precision is the key to safety: "The swords are real swords and the reality is they kill you. They'll go in if you get it wrong and you poke them hard enough. That's reality but we have to let people know the dancers are not using little bits of plastic or wood. The swords are heavy. I'm teaching the dancers to fight in a way which looks real and looks dangerous but actually isn't. Everything on the stage has been choreographed, nothing has been improvised. Every step, every nuance has been put in and made to look as though it's a fresh thought - that's the trick of it. It's the first time real weapons and real fights have been used in a ballet, usually fights are danced. But, Renny points out this production is very different: "We have the ballerinas really going for each other with a knife. It's a real tussle of a fight. The dancers all seem to love it but it's a different discipline but they find it tiring which I find surprising. They are having to learn to pace themselves and build up a stamina for it."
 | | The first use of real weapons in a ballet... |
But being a fight arranger doesn't seem to be such an easy job. Renny is a qualified fencing coach and holds a senior grade in Iwama style Aikido. His first experience of stage fighting was at drama school but, after his first few parts on the stage, he didn't pick up a sword for ten years: "I always wanted to but I was always the character who went, 'there's a fight going on over there' or I'd run off and go and get the police and I'd never get involved." The day came though when touring in a production of Macbeth Renny offered to look after the fight scenes during the tour. After a year or two he was encouraged to join the relevant professional organisation and discovered he had to have qualifications in martial arts, first aid and have reached coaching level in fencing. Renny adds: "Even when I qualified I didn't think it would be a career but it totally changed my life. I still act but the fight side has really taken over and I work every day of the week doing a fight somewhere which is quite extraordinary. I never thought there would be that kind of demand. It's a good job I like it. It's not for everybody but it suits me." So why does Renny spend his days making an art out of fighting? It's certainly not because he enjoys a bit of a brawl: "I have to say I've never had a fight in my life and I don't want one. I suppose what I do is just revertÌý to my childhood and I play. My imagination takes me places and I ask my cast and my director, 'in an ideal world what do you really want to happen?' because people tend to think within the confines of the theatre and of what they think is possible. That's what's exciting, the creation of an image of violence rather than being violent. "I also believe if you've got violence in a production you can't glorify it. Violence is ugly, it's nasty, it hurts, it causes death. It's all those awful things. Obviously you gear the violence to a production but it does have to be believable and real. The characters can't be playing at it." [Northern Ballet Theatre's Three Musketeers has its world premiere at The Alhambra, Bradford on Saturday 23rd September 2006 and continues at the Alhambra until September 30th, then tours]. | 
