DC’s Shawn Shafner Brings Jewish Tradition to Center Stage

Shawn Shafner balances many roles: teaching artist, educator, activist, actor, mindfulness coach and longtime summer camp staff member.

Shafner, who holds a bachelor of fine arts in drama and theater arts, facilitates Jewish ritual theater programs, educating audiences on the East and West coasts about Torah and Jewish tradition.

The multidisciplinary artist is an early childhood educator and ritual facilitator for the nonprofit Storahtelling, where he’s worked since 2005. Shafner runs the theater department at Camp Ramah in northern California in addition to his seasonal work with Trybal Gatherings, a summer camp experience for young adults.

Shafner looks forward to premiering one of his solo shows in June at the Atlas Performing Arts Center in Washington, D.C., where he is an Atlas Arts Lab resident. It’s called “Sheldon Feldman Sings the Songs They Told Me Not to Sing.” Shafner lives with his fiancé in the Brightwood Park neighborhood of D.C.

Tell me about your Jewish upbringing and background.
I guess you could say I grew up in the Conservative movement [in Colorado]; the synagogue we belonged to growing up was within the Conservative movement, but we were always on the Reform side of that. We definitely celebrated Jewish holidays, [but we] didn’t have a strong Shabbat practice growing up — we didn’t go to temple very often — although my sister and I both went to religious school once a week, then twice a week to prepare for our b’mitzvah.

I went to NYU … and college was when I began to find my own journey through Judaism. I was at the musical theater school at NYU Tisch [School of the Arts] and I remember asking a friend, “Are you going to Hillel for the High Holiday service?” — I think I went to the Rosh Hashanah service and I didn’t find it super inspiring. And she said, “I don’t do that; I’m going to the art museum where I’m doing my observation of the holiday.” I was like, “You can do that?” That year, I followed [my friend] there and realized that there is a different way to have contemplative experience.

How did you get to where you are today?
I did a project with Hillel, a devised play about someone wrestling with their queer identity called “Song of Solomon.” Through that, I met the women who would later found the Kohenet Institute and a year later, I received a Spielberg fellowship through the Foundation for Jewish Camp. I was tasked with creating a theater program at a Jewish summer camp. The training for it was a fellowship for a week at the Brandeis-Bardin Institute with [Rabbi] Amichai Lau-Lavie, the founder of what’s now called Lab/Shul, but was then called Storahtelling. That was really my full entrance into Jewish adulthood.

At one point, Amichai and other faculty started playing music and said, “Flip through the siddur. Whenever you find a line or even a word that moves you, go ahead and say it out loud.” We sort of made our own prayer that way. That really changed my understanding of what it meant to be Jewish and to practice Judaism.

What were your responsibilities at Lab/Shul?
I started making interactive theater that brought the stories of the Torah alive. We’d go to communities and when the Torah service began, myself, another actor and two musicians would open the story into this interactive play that was either translated by biblical characters in the story or modern-day people who were reading the story. [Our performances] included the pshat (literal meaning) of the Torah with midrash (rabbinic additions), both ancient and more contemporary.

We were also inspired by the Jewish Renewal movement to open the Torah up with group aliyot (calling up to the Torah), and an interactive question session where we invite the audience to put themselves in the stories. We essentially used techniques from psychodrama in order to reveal their own feelings and emotions around stories.

You’ve been an actor and artist since the age of 5. What about art appeals to you?
Art is a window into what the human experience is in a way that removes our specific identities and enables us to imagine what it could be like to be anybody. I think we’ve always needed it, but now, especially, the ability to have empathy and compassion for an experience that’s not your own is so important. It’s really integral in the Jewish experience as well. “I’m a stranger in a strange land and I have been a stranger before.” Our midrash teaches us this idea that we are to see ourselves through the other. It’s important that we have access to universality of the human experience, and this is really where art comes in.

How do you make summer camp fun for young adults through Trybal Gatherings?
Trybal Gatherings is for adults, primarily for people in their 20s and 30s, and we have a cohort of folks from the D.C. area who come every year, and it’s been a pleasure to watch that community grow. There, it’s kind of like giving young adults a taste of their childhood back, whether they went to summer camp and loved it, or went and didn’t like it and are coming back to reenact their summer camp experience, or if they never went to camp but want a taste of it, or maybe their partner went to camp but they’re not Jewish.

What’s great about Trybal is that they give this connection to Judaism that’s really open. It doesn’t proclaim to have the one true way to practice. However you show up Jewishly is the right way. Our Jewish connection can be through liturgy, through Shabbat, but also through things I do at camp, like through making pickles, doing improv together and celebrating some of our Jewish comedians, through meditation [and] through practicing mindfulness within the Jewish tradition.

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