Master Storytellers Hugh Lupton & Daniel Morden at the Getty Villa

The myths of the ancient Greeks still have the power to charm and chill us today, remaining part of our consciousness millennia after they were first imagined. British storytellers Daniel Morden and Hugh Lupton are renowned for their passionate, lucid, and accessible retellings of Greek myths. Their program illuminates the images in the exhibition Dangerous Perfection: Funerary Vases from Southern Italy, including Jason’s hunt for the Golden Fleece.

Hugh Lupton is one of Britain’s leading storytellers. His interest in traditional music, street theater, live poetry, and myth resulted in his becoming a professional storyteller in 1981. In 1985 he formed the Company of Storytellers with Ben Haggarty and Pomme Clayton. For twelve years the Company toured Britain, running workshops, performing at arts centers and theaters, organizing festivals, and working in education.

His work with Daniel Morden on Greek epics (The Iliad, The Odyssey, and Metamorphases) has received wide acclaim. Lupton and Morden last performed at the Getty Villa in 2007. Lupton’s first novel, The Ballad of John Clare, was published in 2010.

Daniel Morden is one of the UK’s leading exponents in the art of storytelling. For 25 years he has delighted audiences all over the world with his performances, from the Arctic to the Pacific to the Caribbean. With an engaging manner, Morden humorously and compassionately confronts serious existential questions. He has also worked on television and radio, and has published six books. In 2006, together with Hugh Lupton, he won the Classical Association Award for “the most significant contribution to the public understanding of the classics’.”

Morden has twice won the English-language section of the Welsh Books Council’s Tir na n-Og Awards, first in 2007 for Dark Tales from the Woods, based on Welsh folktales, and then in 2013 for Tree of Leaf and Flame, a collection of stories retelling the Mabinogion. In 2014, Morden was deemed the International New Voice at the National Storytelling Festival in Tennessee.

Here’s what critics have said about their work:

Our Favorite event so far, (at the Edinburgh Festival) has been the rendering of “Metamorphases” by master storytellers Hugh Lupton and Daniel Morden. The tale of Echo and Narcissus stopped all our hearts no matter how hardened by age. — The Guardian

I went to the Barbican the other day to listen to two of Britain’s finest storytellers—Hugh Lupton and Daniel Morden—recounting The Iliad, the tale of that great quarrel from which all Western literature springs. The seats were uncomfortable…but the hours flew by. These two men had an entire audience in their thrall. — The Times of London

 

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