Incite/Insight Spring-Summer 2019 Incite_Insight—Spring_Summer 2019 Final | Page 13

Going National
WRITTEN BY JUSTIN DANIEL
Opening Act’s 20-Year Journey towards AATE’s 2019 Conference
Opening Act’s Theatre and Leadership Conservatory | Photo Courtesy of Opening Act
It’s December 18th, 2018. Deadline for
submission is 5 pm.
It’s 4:55.
I’m still putting the finishing touches
on our AATE workshop proposal;
feverishly searching for any last
grammatical errors, performing a
final spell check (I already did it 3
times already), asking my colleague
to read it one last time, all the while
breaking out into a sweat.
Did I save the word document first?
Nope.
Save.
Submit.
4:59.
DONE!
And then I wait. And wait. While
I wait, I continue to do my work
with Opening Act, which provides
high-quality after-school theatre
programs to 56 high need New York
City high schools.
Weeks Pass.
Check my inbox.
New Email.
Congratulations! We are happy to
inform you...
Relief!
Flashback to May 2012 as I’m finishing
up my graduate work in Educational
Theatre at NYU’s Steinhardt School
and searching for future work as a
teaching artist.
As an emerging arts educator, I was
committed to aligning myself with
arts organizations whose missions
were in concert with my personal
values. Finding Opening Act was
like finding a new best friend. I will
never forget the moment I walked
into my first teaching artist training,
being immediately surrounded by
empathetic, committed, and social
justice-minded arts educators who
welcomed me, challenged me, and
ultimately became my colleagues
and friends to this day.
I was placed in a large high school
campus on the Brooklyn/Queens
border with a mentor teaching
artist and we jumped into a year
of improvisation and devising with
teenagers who opted to join a
theatre after school program, which
culminated in my first devised play
with high school students. Along the
way I encountered many triumphs
and frustrations as I navigated
my first year as a teaching artist,
frustrations mostly connected to
student engagement and behavior I
perceived as challenging.
I remember asking myself in
frustration multiple times over the
course of that first school year, “Why
do they show up if they don’t act like
they want to be here?”
The Opening Act I started with was
INCITE/INSIGHT 13