A New World

This post by the lovely Danielle Rennalls was written on November 16. The Open Dream season is now complete and Danielle is on her path to more fun and more work. We wish her the best!


It's a rainy night here in Camp Lejeune, off of the North Carolina coast. We are in the last leg of touring "Peril..." in Eastern North Carolina, having performed in Clarkton and, previously, Southern Pines, NC. I can't help but marvel at the various ecosystems all contained in this seemingly small state; each place has it own energy and pulse, the townspeople friendlier and more helpful than the last. This is my final blog post for the season... Four months flew by mindblowingly fast. I will miss this group of people and all they have taught me through Open Dream Ensemble. I'm grateful to them for allowing me to glean insight into the "business" at large and what it's really like to be a "working artist." I've found joy in speaking or sharing ideas in an open, non-judgmental forum whether it was through Teaching Artist training or formulating lesson plans. Diana shall always be apart of my "toolbox," she's truly reminded me what it was like to be 13 again (give or take a few murderous terraforming machines ;) ). She reinforced the notion that it does take a critical thinking, perseverance, and sacrifice to make dreams come true and I can only cross my fingers in the hopes that I'll have the opportunity to portray someone like her again. She's allowed me to step in myself as an actress after two years of being a director. All in all, I can honestly state this experience has changed me for the better and opened up a whole new world geared towards positive change within our school systems, utilizing a groups multiple intelligences, and, at Open Dreams very core, the importance of teamwork. A very special thank you to the Kenan Institute, Rebecca Nussbaum, and the good folks of NoRules Theater Company for giving me the gift of being apart of this ensemble. Until next year!

More Believable

This post is from our "Diana", Danielle Rennalls. Danielle is a graduate of the UNCSA School of Drama with an emphasis on directing.

Our second residency brought more confidence in my abilities as a teaching artist. It's probably been around Day 3 of the 1st week of Wendell's residency before it occurred to me that the classroom space (i.e. maintaining order, keeping students engaged, holding myself accountable for how well they understood/processed the material) wasn't all that different from directing a play in the theater. Like actors, if you gave the student(s) a role, a purpose and/or reason, the activities/task at hand instantly blossomed. I observed this happen time and time again with each grade level- most often with students considered behaviorally or mentally challenged. In fact, during the same residency at Wendell, we learned our 4th grade block would have 4 or 5 behaviorally challenged and 2 developmentally challenged children, whom all learned separately from most of the students. Yet it became apparent during the movement improvisations exploring landforms (and later types of fossilization) these "challenged" were always "in the moment," and hungry for guidance on how to make it more believable.