About Us
Sword and Oar Productions is a storytelling company based in Montreal, QC. We produce live translations of ancient Greek poetry and original shows inspired by the ancient Greek oral tradition, as well as shorter retellings of other stories and folktales.
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Since our foundation in 2021 as a collaboration between storyteller Tom Giles and director Nicolas Lebrun, we have staged numerous performances for academic and popular audiences alike, including The Death of Homer (Fringe 2024), Between Lions and Men (Aux Angles Ronds/P’tit Ours 2025) and Homeric Death Match (Festival Interculturel du Conte 2025).
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Mission
We originally formed Sword and Oar to stage new translations of the Homeric epics: the Iliad and the Odyssey. Scholars have long acknowledged the role of oral culture and processes in the composition and dissemination of these ‘texts’. But this orality is often forgotten or minimised in contemporary adaptation. Our work seeks to address this. We employ techniques analogous to those of ancient bards - such as improvisation, formulaic composition and live musical accompaniment - to provide audiences with an experience of the poems both more reflective of their original oral-poetic context and more immersive and engaging than the written word.
​Our work with translation has led us to explore other ways of engaging with the oral past. Our first original show, The Death of Homer, combined extracts from Homer and Hesiod with adapted material from elsewhere in the Greek corpus. In other projects we have started to engage with stories from other traditions, to deepen our collaboration with musicians, and to explore how best to represent orality in film. In all of this, we aim to prioritise telling stories in ways that feel fresh, while being rooted in tradition, that are epic while remaining intimate, and that are, above all, entertaining, opening up new perspectives for scholars, while remaining accessible to new audiences.