Homer’s Odysseus at The Medallion

A NH Humanities to Go program.

Using the well-known scenes of The Odyssey, Sebastian Lockwood delivers the passion and intensity of the great epic that deserves to be heard told as it was by bards in the days of old. Lockwood says, “The best compliment is when a ten-year-old comes up and says, ‘I felt like I was there.'” That is the magic of the performance that takes students and adults alike back into the text. The following Q&A can focus on translations and the storytelling techniques used by Homer.

Storyteller and teacher Sebastian Lockwood tells the great epics: Gilgamesh, Odysseus, Caesar, Beowulf and Monkey. His studies in Classics and Anthropology at Boston University and Cambridge University in the UK laid the foundation for bringing these great tales into performance. Lockwood’s performances are designed to take complex texts and make them accessible and exciting for audiences from 5 to 95. Lockwood has tutored and taught classes in higher education for 25 years. He now concentrates on performance, workshops and studio recording.

Medallion Opera House Presents: The Ballad Lives

A NH Humanities To Go Event

Murder and mayhem, robbery and rapine, love that cuts to the bone: American ballads re-tell the wrenching themes of their English and Scottish cousins. Transplanted in the New World by Old World immigrants, the traditional story-song of the Anglos and Scots wound up reinvigorated in the mountains of Appalachia and along the Canadian border.  John Perrault talks, sings, and picks the strings that bind the old ballads to the new.

John earned his BA in English at Providence College, an MA in Political Science at the University of New Hampshire, and a JD at the Franklin Pierce Law Center. He taught high school English for 10 years in Kittery, Maine, and subsequently practiced law in Portsmouth for30 years. He is the author of Jefferson’s Dream, Here Comes the Old Man Now, The Ballad of Louis Wagner, and a recent CD compilation of ballads, Rock and Root. His poetry has appeared in Orbis (UK), The Salmon Poetry Anthology Dogs Singing, The Christian Science Monitor, Blue Unicorn, Commonweal, and elsewhere. John was Poet Laureate of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, 2003-2005.