For the last couple of weeks, Wel­ling­ton has been teased with the sight of grim reap­ers going about their busi­ness around the city. These hooded folk were pro­mot­ing the new play “Good Night – The End”, which has recently opened at Down­stage.  Writ­ten by the multi-tal­en­ted Jo Rander­son, the play looks at a group of three grim reap­ers (and their zesty Itali­an admin­is­trat­or), just spend­ing time in their break room between reap­ing.

And like most people, the stuff that gets dis­cussed on breaks is often noth­ing to do with their work. So instead it’s argu­ments about doing the dishes, using all the Milo, and Cheezels, pies, piz­zas and hash browns, com­ing across as an unruly mix of between The Office, passiveaggressivenotes.com, Big Broth­er and a bit of the Mighty Boosh thrown in for good meas­ure.

There must be some­thing about spring, and craft fairs as this sat­urday has 3 craft­ing events on in our fine city.

Make your first Craft des­tin­a­tion Ber­ham­pore school from 9.30am, it’s home to wel­ling­ton’s pop­u­lar sea­son­al fair, knack. Knack­’s been run­ning since 2007 and there are 3  things I truly love about Knack:

• Knack is run as a fun­draiser for ber­ham­pore school
• Knack is often where you will see some of Wellington’s emer­ging Crafters show cas­ing their crafts for the first time
• There is a lovely laid back vibe at every knack, which makes it a lovely des­tin­a­tion for some crafty cul­ture.

Once you’ve checked out spring knack in Ber­ham­pore head fur­ther down the road and you’ll hit Craft Vil­lage in Island Bay.

Home  to about 50 Crafters, Craft vil­lage is a monthly mar­ket fea­tur­ing loc­al crafters like Kate Bur­gess of Stitch Lips whose quirky cre­ations are fea­tured on the Craft Vil­lage Posters.

Rest up overnight and then head out to the long estab­lished Annu­al Pine­haven Arts and Crafts Fair  at Pine­haven School Hall, Pine­haven Road, Upper Hutt.

It is not a ‘sit at your stall’ type of fair more like a gal­lery where, everything is set out on walls, and dis­play tables. The school hall looks very unas­sum­ing from the out­side but once you get in it’s an eye open­er. The event is a fun­draiser for Pine­haven School, so just like spring knack you can do some shop­ping and feel like you are help­ing make the world a bet­ter place.

It is eDay again tomor­row, your oppor­tun­ity to put your eJunk in your trunk take it to the drop off point to get it taken care of respons­ibly.  Appar­ently 95% of mater­i­als in a com­puter can be recycled and reused and put­ting your elec­tron­ic waste into land­fill just isn’t an option because haz­ard­ous mater­i­als such as lead, mer­cury and cad­mi­um can leach into the earth and get into water­ways.

Where: West­pack Sta­di­um car­park (map here)

When: Sat­urday 12 Septem­ber

Tips for dis­pos­ing of com­puter equipt­ment all year round are on the eDay site here.

We will see you there.

It’s a few minutes to 6pm on a Thursday night, a mot­ley group are mak­ing their way along the Ter­race to the St Andrew’s Church Hall. Inside, there are already a dozen or so people in cas­u­al attire. These are the “Advanced Class” who came at 5pm. Many of them stay on after their class to help and coach the “Begin­ners” who are arriv­ing for their ses­sion with teach­er Michael Har­ris. The begin­ners don’t come too early, because watch­ing the advanced prac­tise is very dis­cour­aging.

This is Thursday night dan­cing.

Every 8 weeks a new begin­ners class com­mences. Last night was the second ses­sion of the latest term, and already we’re old hands at the Clap Dance and fox­trot. We’re new hands at Rock ‘n Roll. Next week, God knows what fresh hum­il­a­tions await.

Old hands have expressed delight that this ter­m’s intake is almost equal num­bers of men & women. This means the more advanced women don’t have to dance as men so much. Men nev­er have to dance as women.

The class begins with a simple war­mup in the form of the “Clap Dance”. This is because after every few steps, a lusty clap is required, before tippy-tap­ping back in towards your part­ner to bump hips. On the off chance you man­age to con­nect without dis­lo­cat­ing your part­ner­’s hips, you get an encour­aging com­ment from Michael. Me? After learn­ing the next stage of the tippy-tap­ping, which involves a spin and a clap, I found myself about 10 metres away from my part­ner & hav­ing to sprint back in from across the room to attempt my “bump”.

090909 UpStage Fest­iv­al Pre­view from UpStage on Vimeo.

9 Septem­ber (tomor­row) at 2pm get thee to a “real life” (RL) access node at the New­Dowse (or a com­puter that does­n’t have all of the bells and whistles blocked) for the 3rd UpStage Fest­iv­al, 090909.  www.upstage.org.nz will play host to 13 live online per­form­ances, ‘cyber­form­ances’ no less, that span 9 time zones.

How does it work?

Well.…..

UpStage is a web-based plat­form that enables people any­where in the world to par­ti­cip­ate in live online per­form­ances, cre­ated in real-time by geo­graph­ic­ally dis­persed per­formers.  Audi­ences inter­act through a text chat tool.  The play­ers use images, audio, video and text to cre­at the per­form­ances, oper­at­ing “avatars” – graph­ic­al char­ac­ters that move and speak aloud.  The per­form­ances are access­able to any­one with an inter­net browser.

Three mem­bers of the Wel­ling­tonista are already glee­fully plan­ning our out­fits for the open­ing of the Montana World of Wear­ableArt Awards Show in on the 24th of Septem­ber at TSB arena.  The huge mar­ket­ing push has begun with ads pop­ping up near the air­port and the details of the WOW wander are being hammered out as I type.  The show is worth around 10 mil­lion dol­lars to the Wel­ling­ton eco­nomy and we will no doubt see cre­at­ive lunges for our atten­tion on a par with ‘that ice­berg’ and ‘those reap­ers’.  Let’s hope they do Wel­ling­ton proud with more cre­ativ­ity and less branded bumpf. 

Last year the supreme award went to Wel­ling­to­ni­an Nad­ine Jaggi and this year sees Wel­ling­to­ni­ans dom­in­at­ing the field again with 40 out of the 165 gar­ments from loc­als.  Last year Aunty Helen (or her COMMS people) did a mighty job of writ­ing a speech on the fly but although I am sure the awards will be “World Class”™ I am not sure that we need John on stage with giant paua encrus­ted key for the occa­sion this year (but if he wants to give the paua dress anoth­er out­ing.…)

What was that sound of cry­ing and wail­ing all over Wel­ling­ton yes­ter­day? Why were single ladies pulling their hair and sob­bing onto one another­’s shoulders? Did it have any­thing to do with a cer­tain DPF chan­ging his face­book status from “Single” to “In a rela­tion­ship”?

The Wel­ling­tonista’s Font of all Film Know­ledge Dan Slev­in has been get­ting excited about this one.

For the next fort­night the Film Archive is show­ing a ret­ro­spect­ive of the work of Wel­ling­ton-based inde­pend­ent film mak­ing col­lect­ive Van­guard Films.

Screen­ing at the Archive’s cinema on the corner of Tarana­ki and Ghuznee Sts, are a range of excep­tion­al doc­u­ment­ar­ies and dra­mas, with equip­ment and gear used by the film makers over the years, also on dis­play. There’s even a Bolex cam­era saved from detec­tion by the French Mil­it­ary at Mur­uroa Atoll in 1973. Hid­den in a bar­rel of oranges (the film stock in a sack of flour) a decoy cam­era was con­fis­cated, but one Bolex remained in Van­guard mem­ber Alister Barry­’s pos­ses­sion which he used to shoot foot­age of the Mur­uroa test site.    

Don’t miss Rus­sell Camp­bell and Alister Barry on Sunday with Chris Laid­law this week­end at 9:30am (appro­pri­ately just after Medi­awatch). And come in to the Film Archive to find out more about the col­lect­ive’s cease­less polit­ic­al and social act­iv­ism over the last 30 years.