Our Team
Sword and Oar Productions is composed of co-founders Tom Giles and Nicolas Lebrun as well as a rotating group of musical and artistic collaborators.
Tom Giles - Performer and Translator
Tom Giles is a classicist and storyteller originally from the UK. They started performing ancient Greek poetry as part of their master’s research under established performer and Homerist Lynn Kozak (McGill). Following Kozak, Tom often uses a methodology they term ‘translation-in-performance’, rehearsing but never writing or fixing a translation before a show, so that each composition is unique and responsive to the vagaries of the moment.
As a researcher, Tom is interested in the construction of fictional and historical narrative, the philosophy of memory and death, orality, and performance studies. They have presented at the Celtic Conference in Classics, Howard University and the Center for Hellenic Studies. As a storyteller, Tom regularly performs at Montreal’s Confabulation and as a member of the Montreal Storytellers Guild, and was a mentee in the 2025 Festival Interculturel du Conte de Montréal.
Nicolas Lebrun - Director
Nicolas Lebrun is a Montreal-based filmmaker and theatre practitioner interested in questions surrounding the relationship between our media environment and artistic production. His films often combine the visual vernacular of digital media with traditional narrative forms in order to reconfigure the relationship between image, subject, and spectator. Past works include BIXI Thieves (co-directed with Alissa Zilber), and Me You Him Her (co-directed with Amanda Miserocchi).
These concerns extend into his theatre practice as a co-founder of Sword and Oar Productions, a company dedicated to staging live translations of ancient Greek texts and treating performance as a living medium through which ancient narratives are reanimated for the present moment. Together, these practices pursue ways of reorienting audiences through immersive, participatory encounters that bridge established artistic traditions and innovative media forms. Attempts to combine these practices form the basis of his research at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema, where he is completing an MFA in Cinematic Arts.
