News From OISTAT
Events Around the World Open to USITT Members
Novi Sad, Serbia, was the setting for the September OISTAT Executive Committee and Governing Board meeting hosted by SCEN the Serbian OISTAT Center and the University of Novi Sad. The meeting was held in conjunction with the international conference Radical Space in Between Disciplines.
Among the activities the group discussed was a Lighting Forum and Master Workshop held in Taipei, Taiwan, in early October with Dutch lighting designer Henk van der Geest and Taiwanese lighting designers Da- Wei- Lim and Chi-Yang. The workshop immediately followed the International Lighting Symposium in Hong Kong, China, with keynote speeches from Jennifer Tipton, Beijing Olympic lighting designer Xiaolan Sha, and Taiwanese lighting designer Lee Zee Chien.
Taiwan also recently hosted two symposia: an International Cultural Landmark & Its Communities Symposium at the Wei-We-Ying Center of the Arts in Kaohsiung and a Train the Trainers program dealing with performing arts management hosted by OISTAT in cooperation with TPAC Taiwan Performing Arts Connection sponsored by Taiwan National Culture and Arts Foundation.
Costume at the Turn of the Century, 1990-2015 and a meeting of the OISTAT Costume Working Group was held at the Bakhrushin Museum in Moscow, Russia..
These events are a few of the international activities organized by OISTAT available to USITT members. Members of the Institute can find other events posted on the OISTAT Web Site www.oistat.org
OISTAT has several meetings and activities coming up:
- The Beijing International Biannual, ISDSWE International students of Design Works Exchange, an exhibit of student design work from around the world, and a student “design as performance” workshop will take place in the fall of 2016.
- The OISTAT Architecture Commission will meet in Seville Spain in the fall of 2016.
- The Performance Design Commission will meet as part of USITT 2016 in Salt Lake City, Utah, March 16 to 19.
- The Costume Design Working Group will meet in November during the World Costume Festival in the Philippines.
- The Technology Commission is planning a meeting in St. Petersburg, Russia, in May.
Much effort is going into organizing World Stage Design (WSD 2017) Exhibit and Scenofest in Taipei,Taiwan, July 1 to 9, 2017. The deadline to submit designs will be December of 2016. OISTAT will again organize a Theatre Architecture Competition 2017. The results will be exhibited at WSD 2017. Information will be available www.wsd2017.com.
Any USITT member interested in more information about any of these activities may contact Michael Ramsaur, head of the USITT OISTAT Center, at mram@stanford.edu.
OISTAT continues to develop its Core Strategy Project and seeks students from USITT to participate. The project is an international student collaboration to evaluate the management, branding, marketing, and development of OISTAT to improve its understanding worldwide. Anyone interested should contact Carl Walling, chair of a working group to combine Taiwanese, Serbian, and American students, at carl.h.walling@gmail.com. OISTAT looks to USITT to suggest students to provide direction and specific activities to improve OISTAT’s profile and position within theatre.
All USITT members are part of OISTAT and can participate in its many international activities created and organized for the general benefit of the theatrical discipline worldwide.
These activities include the International Theater Architectural Competition; the quadrennial World Stage Design Exhibit; the Technical Invocation Prize; the Beijing International Biennale; International Stage Design Students Works Exchange; the USITT International Workshop Tour; Theater Words, Digital Theater Words online, and the DTW App of translations and multilingual lexicons; the World Scenography volumes documenting design from around the world; and Scenofest at PQ and at WSD.
