Northwoods Ramah Theatre Festival
This past weekend, camp hosted the Northwoods Ramah Theatre Festival, now in its fourth summer. Some of the events have included a staff poetry reading Friday night, an open reading of a play Shabbat afternoon and performances on Saturday evening. The festival culminated in the performance of three pieces of theatre on Sunday. These pieces were created at camp over the past two weeks by the Northwoods Ramah Theatre Company and were performed for the whole camp throughout the day on Sunday. 
Annie Levy, the resident director of the company for the past four years, is a New York based freelance director. She has her Masters in Theatre with a Directing Concentration from Sarah Lawrence College and works with theatre in a variety of ways, including Storahtelling. She is also a college adjunct and strongly believes in educational theater, in which she uses theatre to teach other subjects.
Annie Levy (Resident Director, Northwoods Ramah Theatre Company): For the past four summers, we have come to camp with an idea for a show or shows that we want to create based on some non-traditional piece of text that is in some way inherently Jewish. Our first summer, we did a show based on a Kabbalistic short story. One summer we did a show based on a short story by Bernard Malamud. The third summer we actually didn't create a show, but commissioned a show based on a newspaper article about the last two Jews in Kabul, Afghanistan. This summer we are going back to creating theatre during our residency. Instead of creating one big piece of theatre, we decided to create three smaller pieces of theatre. This summer we are focusing on Jewish poets. The three poets we are working with are the Israeli poet Rachel, the objectivist poet Charles Reznikoff, and the kid-friendly poet Shel Silverstein.
This summer, as in past summers, the theatre pieces will be done mostly by the company, with some junior counselors and some of the older campers. The company is Jonathan Ross (Rosh Performing Arts, also known as JAR), Frannie Silverman, who is with us for her fourth summer, a new actor from Chicago Geoff Rice, and Sara Lederman who is a junior counselor. It's exciting because we first met Sara our first summer when she was in Machon. She was a big fan of ours and always came to our rehearsals. This summer she is on drama staff, so we were happy to invite her into the company.
This theatre company has really been JAR's baby. When he was a camper, he was not here for his Nivo summer because one of his mentors told him he needed to have a more traditional theatre summer experience in order to be desirable to the colleges he wanted to apply to for performing arts. So he had an idea that never again would a camper have to choose between being in camp and pursuing artistic endeavors elsewhere. He recruited me and Frannie and another actor the first summer and we created the company. The idea was that we would be in camp as part of the modeling pedagogy that camp does where there are consistently artists making art around camp. Campers can see the art, get excited about what they see, and it can help them to realize the full extent of their own work. Here we have a completely open rehearsal process. We rehearse for most of the day and campers can come in at any point during the day, whether it be during a run or during a discussion. They can watch as long as they want, ask questions. The idea is that they are watching art being created. Plus, campers get to see camp supporting professional Jewish artists. Art isn't something that they can just do at camp or at school. If they love it and have a passion for it, they don't have to leave it when they "grow up."