Theatre Design & Technology - Feb 1970 - 3

Editorial and News: Changes
This is my final issue of TD&T before the
editorship is passed on: the normal tenure
of volunteer editors for professional journals
is two or three years. After five, and another year spent getting started, I have asked
the Institute's Executive Committee to select a replacement. In the interim, J. Wesley Zeigler will act as Editor of the journal's
next issue or two.
In many ways, putting together TD&T has
been one of the most satisfying professional
undertakings of my career to date. (Editors
are allowed smaller measures of maudlin
display than presidents, in the great organizational scheme of things, else I might
wax more eloquent.) It is heady business
to create a journal without precedent or
blueprint, and I thank you for the opportunity to do it under US ITT's logo.
Presidents Rubin, Swinney and Smith have
all been understanding chief executives
when the inevitable decision vacuums have
been filled out of church. Rubin, especially,
helped to make the initial great leap forward, to help supress the word "technics"
from our operational language for a while,
and in general to regulate the climate of
editorial freedom, which I've prized. Associate Editors Gaiser McCarthy and Watson
(inadvertently promoted from "Assistant"
Editors one sleepy night before a deadline) have been mainstays over the entire
period--both are as qualified as I. Gaiser
edited an endl ess 1967 convention issue
as a special contribution to the Institute
which has never really been acknowledged.

Mr. Harvey Hoechstetter, our printer from
the beginning, has contributed in many
quiet ways to the success of the journal,
above and beyond his printer's statement,
to say nothing of my broadened education
in the limitations of the offset process.
Finally, the Institute should realize that my
Department Chairman, Dr. Jack Matthews
has a considerably larger stake in the Institute than many of its members realize,
through quiet contributions in the earliest
days of the journal, and later when small
emergencies arose.
There is no particular significance to choice
of theatre outside the U. S. as the focus
for a last issue: it has been brewing for
some time. As I have travelled the past few
years, it would have been difficult to overestimate the influence on scenography
worked by Czech designers and technicians.
Elsewhere in this issue, Tom DeGaetani
alludes to the significance of Worlds Fairs
on contemporary thinking about stage design, engineering and theatre buildings. The
most influential of these, in my opinion, has
been Czech work at Brussels and Montreal.
Our two Svoboda articles are an attempt to
document some of the other Czech influences and experiments-in an effort to prove
that the man's work is anything but an isolated phenomenon.
Abroad, too, TD&T has played a part in
spreading the word on scenography in the
U. S. We've been quoted or repUblished in
both Germanys: Buhnentechnische Rund-

schau's Gabler rejoinder to our May '67
article on theatre chair acoustics (see p.
30-31, this issue); and republication of
our Frink and Cramer articles on computergenerated sightlines was recently quoted in
translation by East Germany's Scena. Importantly, both chose to correct possible
misinterpretations and to amplify or question our authors' findings, based on their
own expert qualifications. As well, we've
been reproduced and reviewed in France,
England, South Africa, Australia, Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union, by theatre and
architecture periodicals. Permissions granted
to reproduce from our pages in trade books
are another warming indicator that we're
doing our intended job: being read and
thought about by the profession.
Most satisfying to me, personally, are the
occasional serious and clearly critical papers we've fostered: like C. Ray Smith's
article on the Kennedy Center's architecture, which another theatre journal solicited
and then was afraid to print; or Mert Cramer's convention paper ondimmertesting procedures. This, to me, is manifest evidence
of US ITT's claim to an open forum for all
relevant viewpoints. It's what we have that
few (if any) other tech theatre organizations or journals in the world can afford. I
wish my successors strength and stamina
in their search for more dissenting viewpoints-and large, clear, contrasty photographs to illustrate them.

NED A BOWMAN

OFFICIAL NOTiCES:
Beginning with May's issue, Theatre Design and Technology will accept display advertising. Those interested in rate schedules and other information about ads should
contact Dr. Donald Swinney, Hofstra University Theatre, Hemstead, New York,
11550 (telephone area 516, 560-3281l.
The Institute's annual Conference is sched-

@illO THEATER DESIGN AND TECHNOLOGY

uled for April 15-18, 1970, at the Barbizon Plaza Hotel in New York. Formal sessions are focused on Dance Production,
Sound in the Theatre, New Techniques and
Products, and Architecture and the Psychology--of Aesthetic Distance. Further information is available by contacting the Institute's Headquarters, 245 West 52nd
Street, New York, N. Y. 10019.

FEBRUARY, 1970

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