The Justice Theater Project holds three summer theater camps for youth each year. This year’s camp at St. Francis of Assisi, from July 11th to July 29th, was the camp’s 14th summer. It began small, with just 7 campers, and this year we had an enrollment of 85 campers, 30 high school and college counselors and a professional staff of 10. The camp at St. Francis is three weeks in length and culminates with a full theater production with lights, sound, costumes, and set. The camp is a beautiful blend of church and community members with campers driving from near and far to attend. Some campers and counselors only see each other for the three weeks of camp each summer. An extraordinary number of scholarships are given to camper families in need, and for the past two summers we have waived our fees for before and after care to help families during the current economic recession. This year’s summer production was The Jungle Book.
Nick Kempton, a participant of Justice Theater Project’s summer camps since middle school, is now a junior at UNC-Wilmington and continues to return to the camps to assist as a counselor. This year he is teaching a session at the JTP camps on film studies, which, along with English and Theater, are his majors in college. Nick remembers fondly his first lessons as a 7th grader when he learned the importance of voice projection, stage presence, and interplay with others – all skills he continues to draw from as an actor on stage as well as in his current role as Residence Assistant in a dorm at UNCW.
Several high school counselors noted how they loved to help the younger camp participants learn to creatively express themselves. And they also laughed aloud and said that Deb and Melissa are so fun, “There’s never a dull moment. They (Deb and Melissa) are always engaging us to grow and become better people.”
In addition to St. Francis of Assisi’s summer camp, JTP also provided a summer camp in Durham at the Emily K Center August 1st to August 13th. This is the sixth summer of camp shows at the Emily K Center. JTP was the first summer camp at the space when it opened, and enrollment is capped each year at 65 campers.
Lastly, for the second time, this summer we provided a 100% scholarship camp at The Safety Club in Raleigh, which was funded both years by the Franciscan Friars of the Holy Name Province, and this year additional funding was secured from the Mary Duke Biddle Foundation.
All camps conclude in a full production with children of all ages expressing their gifts for the stage.
On August 17, nearly a hundred people gathered at St. Francis of Assisi to watch Budrus, a feature documentary film about a Palestinian community organizer, Ayed Morrar, who unites local Fatah and Hamas members along with Israeli supporters in an unarmed movement to save his village of Budrus from destruction by Israel’s Separation Barrier. This is an inspirational story of how success eludes them until his 15-year-old daughter, Iltezam, launches a women’s contingent that quickly moves to the front lines. Struggling side by side, father and daughter unleash an inspiring, yet little-known, movement in the Occupied Palestinian Territories that is still gaining ground today. In an action-filled documentary chronicling this movement from its infancy, Budrus shines a light on people who choose nonviolence to confront a threat. The movie is directed by filmmaker Julia Bacha (co-writer and editor of Control Room and co-director Encounter Point), and produced by Bacha, Palestinian journalist Rula Salameh, and filmmaker and human rights advocate Ronit Avni (formerly of WITNESS, Director of Encounter Point).
