iD Dunedin Fashion Week announced new dates for 2011 at an exclusive launch on Thursday 19 August 2010. Now in its 12^th year, this highly successful week celebrating the city’s fashion identity, creativity and distinct style will take place from 5-10 April 2011 in Dunedin, New Zealand.

Chair of iD Fashion Week Committee Susie Staley said that the fashion week dates had been moved from March to April to help attract the attendance of international guest designers and judges. 

“We are in the process of securing international guests, with some exciting announcements to be made shortly.  We would like to build on the attention iD has attracted as place on the global fashion calendar, showcasing the best emerging New Zealand and international talent. March is a challenging month for iD to secure international designers or judges due to their other fashion calendar commitments such as London, Milan and Paris fashion weeks. With this in mind we have made a commitment to announce our 2011 dates.”

Staley added that the change in dates also provides an opportunity to attract visitors to Dunedin during a shoulder season.

The iD Fashion Week Committee acknowledged ongoing support from the Dunedin City Council event funding, providing a commitment to the event over the next three years. Additional funding including a naming rights sponsor is still being sought to allow the 2011 fashion week to run to its full capacity.

The exclusive launch gave attendees a sneak preview of upcoming spring/summer fashion collections by successful Dunedin designers and retailers Carlson, Charmaine Reveley, DADA (Marie Strauss) and Waughs, and retail outlets Bellebird and White by Design. The collections were showcased by local talent from Ali McD Modelling Agency.

A complimentary Absolut Charmaine Reveley cocktail designed by Charmaine Reveley – showing another string to her creative bow – alongside canapés by award-winning Pier 24 chef Michael Coughlin made the launch a highly stimulating mix of fashion and food. 

Spot prizes at the launch were provided by Carlson, Charmaine Reveley, Life Pharmacy, Revlon and Waughs. Goodie bags were provided by Life Pharmacy.

Watch out for further details on the 2011 iD Dunedin Fashion Week and exclusive events to follow, yet to be announced.

The ‘sell out’ launch event commenced at 5.45pm on Thursday 19 August at Pier 24, St Clair Beach Resort, Dunedin.  Over 100 guests attended.

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The pop star Mariah Carey is the newest guest from “Os Independentes”, group that organizes the “Festa do Peão de Barretos” to make the opening concert of the 55^th edition of the Rodeo Festival, on August 21, Saturday.

The concert is the most expected attraction of the entire history of Barretos’ stadium. Mariah’s presence will fill all 50,000 seats available.

The singer  won the most important music industry awards, including five Grammy’s and eight American Music Awards.

She has been part of the team of great artists who have performed at the stages of the Cowboy Festival such as Garth Brooks in 1998, Allan Jackson in 1999, Reba McEntire in 2000, A-ha and Gloria Gaynor in 2002.

Oldest and largest in Latin America, the Rodeo Barretos lasts 10 days and has cultural attractions, sports and dining attractions in a complex of two million square meters.

Part of its income is donated to the Barretos’ Cancer Hospital, in Portuguese know as “Hospital do Câncer de Barretos”, reference in oncology in Brazil, which has partnerships with the Mayo Clinic, MD Anderson and St. Judes Hospital.

Almost a million people from all over Brazil and also from foreign countries will visit the town in August to check the show closely.

Show your support for the Child Cancer Foundation with this stylish Limited Edition gemstone necklace.

Kagi has once again teamed up with the Child Cancer Foundation to produce this fundraiser necklace, available for $175.

www.kagijewellery.com

Otago Polytechnic Fashion graduate Roxanna Zamani has achieved yet another notch on her awards belt, taking out a Fashion tv Oceania Online Design Award on Monday 19^th July.

The 24 year old won first prize in the Evening Wear/Couture category, before being announced the overall prize winner for her designs, which will be showcased at the Perth Fashion Festival in September this year.

Following the completion of a Bachelor of Design (Fashion) in 2009, Ms. Zamani and Ms Hardy were first noticed when they were selected to show at the 2010 iD Dunedin Fashion Week, and the iD Dunedin Emerging Designer Awards in Dunedin.

This has been a year of fashion success for Ms. Zamani, originally from Invercargill, who recently won the Wedding Italian Style Award, in the prestigious Mittelmoda Fashion Awards, in Gorizia, Italy.

Fellow Otago Polytechnic graduate Sophie Hardy, who attended Mittelmoda, has also achieved a win at the Fashiontv Awards, taking out the Lifestyle Collections category.

Fashiontv was founded in France in 1997, and has since become one of the best distributed fashion satellite channels in the world featuring up to date and cutting edge footage, the latest fashion trends, models, parades and events.

“We are absolutely thrilled with their achievements,” said Otago Polytechnic School of Fashion Academic Leader Margo Barton.  “Roxanna and Sophie are competing at an international level and winning major awards. As young and upcoming designers, they have already made some major headway in the fashion industry.”

“This is also a strong reflection of the high calibre of design students that graduate from the Polytechnic.” 

The success of the Fashion programme mirrors the growth of Design at Otago Polytechnic in Dunedin with the School now hosting more than 500 students from around New Zealand and the world, and offering degrees in Fashion, Product, Communications and Interior Design

"Heroes" creator Tim Kring and Nokia today unveiled Conspiracy For Good (CFG, www.ConspiracyForGood.com), an inaugural movement that blends online and real-world tasks to effect social change through audience participation. CFG combines Kring's original storytelling (www.ConspiracyForGood.com/about) and Nokia's Ovi platform (www.ovi.com) to create a dramatic, fictional experience using interactive theatre, mobile and alternate reality gaming (ARG), music and physical participation to do good in the world.

Participants will become part of the plot development and will find the necessary tools and clues to move the narrative forward and into the real-world, ultimately creating social and educational change for the Chataika Basic School, located in the village of Chataika in eastern Zambia.  

"I believe that storytelling has the power to create positive change in the world. Audiences today want to be more involved in stories," said Tim Kring, 2010 Digital Emmy Pioneer Award winner for transmedia storytelling. "Our goal with the Conspiracy For Good is to entice, engage, and inspire the audience to drive real-world change through their participation in a narrative."

The Backstory (Fictional Plot)
Over the decades, members of Conspiracy For Good have been reputed to be quietly and effectively doing good in the world's most troubled areas. But CFG is not without enemies, and it is now under fierce attack by Blackwell Briggs (www.blackwellbriggs.com), a London-based multinational company committed to advanced infrastructure development and security services. For help, CFG turned to Kring, a master storyteller, to share their story, recruit new members to read the signs, and bring down Blackwell Briggs.

Joining the Conspiracy For Good
Participants enter into the story, which fuses reality and fiction, through www.ConspiracyForGood.com, where they will join like-minded thinkers, artists, musicians and causes, creating a unified voice to fight for social and environmental justice. The audience can take action within their own comfort zone and level of engagement to meet new people with similar interests online and in person, and have some fun too. Participants who join CFG will be able to solve mysteries online, play casual mobile games or be a physical participant in the London events that will take place from mid-July through early August.

CFG brings to life many of the experiences that Ovi, Nokia's Internet service platform, offers to people that use its devices. CFG participation on Ovi occurs through a series of existing and upcoming apps including casual games like "Exclusion" (http://tiny.cc/4ujaw) and "Mainframe Liberator" (http://tiny.cc/r9qfx) that unlock codes to confidential websites, Ovi Maps (www.ConspiracyForGood.com/map) to guide characters through the story, and Ovi Music where hidden information within songs can be deciphered to advance the story.

In the UK, participants will be able to download a special edition app called Conspiracy For Good: DeadDrop powered by Nokia's Point & Find service. Available in the UK Ovi Store (http://store.ovi.com) in mid-July, the app will allow players to point at objects and images in the real-world to discover clues and participate in challenges during the series of upcoming events in London.

"Tim Kring has truly realized the potential for Nokia's Ovi platform as an additional distribution channel to once more advance storytelling through interconnected services and active audience participation," said Tero Ojanperä, executive vice president, Nokia. "Conspiracy For Good is Nokia's most powerful example to date for how content owners can blur the lines between the online and real-world to connect people to change."

How to Join ConspiracyForGood.com
Anyone is welcome to join the conspiracy from any country. For those who live in or plan to visit London later this summer, event participation is free, registration to www.ConspiracyForGood.com is required and no purchase is necessary.

WELCOME is the multi award-winning new film from writer/director Philippe Lioret – a compassionate and inspiring drama about the unlikely friendship between two men contending with issues of lost love and dislocation.

17-year-old Bilal (Firat Ayverdi) has spent the last three months travelling illegally across Europe, in an attempt to reunite with his girlfriend who has moved with her family to England.

WELCOME is in cinemas July 1^st.

The history books are full of the champions who put New Zealand on the map and gave us an international reputation for creating ground breaking heroes.

But what about the people who don’t have their chapter in the history books? The ones whom we weren’t taught about at school?

The bumblers and the ne’er-do-wells who personify the archetypal “She’ll be right” spirit that made this country great. Finally we have their champion in Te Radar.

From the men who sparked the great Uranium Rush of the 1960’s, to New Zealand’s first aeronautical death, several years before the Wright brothers even left the earth, to the General who lost his pants and nearly doomed his army after getting lost circumnavigating Mt Taranaki, Te Radar celebrates those who tried, and more often than not failed.

With the aid of a visual presentation rich with photographs, maps, and other images, the show is a hilarious romp through the pages of our history.

Te Radar’s solo show has toured extensively around New Zealand covering both major centres and smaller towns. Recent seasons include Taupo, Auckland, KeriKeri and Greymouth.

Plain astonishing…. If you don’t choke with laughter you might learn something”.
Waikato Times.

There’s a trick to getting people laughing about cannibalism… Te Radar’s mastered it.
Taranaki Daily News

“We went out feeling proud to be New Zealanders”
Nelson Daily Mail

Te Radar’s Eating the Dog

29 Jun – 10 Jul

Times: Tue-Wed 6:30pm, Thur-Sat 8pm

Prices: $49-$25, see downstage.co.nz for detailed pricing

Matinee: Sat 3 Jul @ 4pm

Meet the Artists: Wed 30 Jun

Book online www.downstage.co.nz or by phone (04) 801 6946.

‘Judging the inaugural NZSA/Pindar Prize for an unpublished manuscript was a fascinating and challenging exercise,’reports novelist and short story writer Graeme Lay, one of the three judges of the award. The other two judges were Mia Yardley, Editorial Manager of Pindar New Zealand and Linda Herrick, Arts and Books editor of the New Zealand Herald.

There were 508 entries for the competition, which was open to a manuscript in any genre. ‘As a result of this inclusive entry criterion,’ Graeme Lay says, ‘every genre was represented, including adult fiction, children’s fiction, poetry and non-fiction. The diversity was amazing.’

Entrants were required to submit a synopsis and a sample of their writing, not the entire manuscript. For example, the sample could have been the first two chapters of a novel, two short stories or 15 poems. The judges were not aware of the identity of any of the entrants.

When they met to draw up a long list of finalists, the judges were struck by the quality of the writing. It was extremely difficult to decide on the final five, as several of the long-listed manuscripts were of a publishable standard.

After the five finalists were selected, the judges read the entire manuscript for each of them.

The final five manuscripts were all adult fiction. Why was this so?

Graeme Lay comments: ‘Quality fiction has an emotional force which is seldom found in non-fiction. Although there were strong non-fiction manuscripts – accounts of illness and family histories, for example – the five adult fiction manuscripts carried the day because their plots were gripping, their characters engrossing and their settings vividly evoked. The element of dramatic conflict which is essential to worthwhile fiction was constantly present in the narratives.’

The five finalists were: Surrender by Donna Malane, Even the Trees Are Bent, by Paul Maunder, What You Wish For, by Catherine Robertson, Tomorrow’s Rain, by Eric Smart and Chasing the Moon, by Anne Stubbings.

And what did these five narratives contain? ‘There were two crime novels,’ Graeme Lay states, ‘one set in Wellington and the other on the South Island ’s west coast. There was a novel about a romance novelist determined to break free from the genre, an episodic novel based on a series of encounters in Egypt and one set during the genocidal war between the Hutus and the Tutsis in 1990s Rwanda .’

The samples of the five finalists were also posted online and voting was invited via the internet, as the basis for a Readers’ Choice Award.

Meanwhile, the judges read and re-read the final five until the winner was decided upon: Donna Malane’s Surrender, a murder mystery set in contemporary Wellington .

Graeme Lay observes:

‘We were all impressed by the forcefulness of Donna’s plot, the vividness of her writing and the resilience of her central character. She was also able to interweave elements of humour into the narrative’s brutality and mystery.’

The plot of Surrender involves a woman’s quest to find the identity of her much-loved young sister’s killer. In doing so she becomes embroiled in Wellington ’s underworld and its lethal intrigues. A parallel narrative involves the identity ofa headless male body, found by a tramper in a cave in Wellington ’s hinterland.

The judges all agreed that Surrender was a crime novel of high quality, one which could hold its own in international company. Co-judge Linda Herrick comments: ‘’The narrative included a convincing sense of place; you felt that the writer knew Wellington and its environs very well, and this added to the novel’s feeling of authenticity.

The characters were well drawn, particularly the female lead, but peripheral characters also rang true. The writing was crisp and compelling, driving the narrative along at a great pace towards the climax. And co-judge Mia Yardley concludes,

‘Surrender is a worthy addition to the growing catalogue of New Zealand crime fiction.’

The manuscript will go into production immediately and will be published in August. The sponsors for the award will all contribute to the publication of Surrender.

The New Zealand Society of Authors (PEN NZ Inc.) will provide editorial services; Pindar NZ will manage the production, including design and typesetting; and the book will be printed by Astra Print. The New Zealand Herald will promote Surrender and will offer half-price vouchers to its readers to purchase the book; while Whitcoulls will provide promotion and distribution throughout New Zealand .

The president of the Society of Authors, Tony Simpson, remarks, ’the level of sponsorship for this award has been amazing, and we are proud to have been one of the instigators of this prize, along with Pindar NZ. Without the support of our sponsors this prize would never have happened.’

In the online voting for the NZSA/Pindar Publishing Prize, the Readers’ Choice Award was won by Chasing the Moon, by Anne Stubbings, who wins $300 worth of book tokens, donated by Whitcoulls.

A New Zealand student will this month go up against the world’s best in Google's first-ever global Doodle 4 Google competition.

 To celebrate the 2010 FIFA World Cup, Google invited young people across New Zealand to show their love for the game by designing a Google logo inspired by the theme “I love football". A New Zealand Top 10 were chosen from the hundreds of entries received, and Kiwi Google users were asked to vote for their favourite.

From the thousands of votes cast at www.google.co.nz/doodle4google, 13-year-old Southland student Holly Pierce emerged as the crowd favourite, receiving nearly one-quarter of all votes.

Holly’s vibrant doodle features footballs in place of the Google Os, and also incorporates a World Cup and referee’s whistle. It will be displayed on the Google New Zealand homepage for 24 hours to support the All Whites on the day of their first match on 15 June 2010, to be viewed by millions of people.

Holly’s design will then be entered into the global competition, going up against the other international Doodle 4 Google winners, where people from around the world will vote for their overall favourite doodle. The winning design will be displayed on the Google homepage of all participating countries for 24 hours in July 2010.

To vote for Holly’s doodle in the international competition, head to www.google.co.nz/doodle4google from June 21. Voting will be open for one week until June 28.

Ria van Dyke, sponsored by Econo-Heat, has taken the Miss Universe New Zealand title for 2010 in front of a packed audience at Wellington's Duxton Hotel on Saturday.

Miss East Auckland, Danijela Unkovich, is runner-up, while Miss Auckland, Caren Freeman, is second runner-up.Miss van Dyke, 21, holds a BA (Hons.) with distinction in psychology and sociology. She will now represent New Zealand at Miss Universe in Las Vegas, Nevada, on August 23.

After celebrating, Miss van Dyke returns to Auckland to complete two essays due Monday for her master’s degree.

Val Lott, director of the Miss Universe New Zealand pageant, says, 'I am delighted with the decision, and to understand it was unanimous makes me even happier.'

Ms Lott says she was very impressed with the reception and support Wellingtonians have given to the pageant.

Jack Yan, publisher of Lucire, headed the judging panel. 'Ria did extremely well and was consistent from the swimwear section on Friday night, through a gruelling interview at the Museum Hotel, to tonight's final at the Duxton,' he says.

He says that Miss van Dyke speaks from the heart and has the level of international experience that makes her ideal for Miss Universe New Zealand 2010.

He served on the panel with stylist Samantha Hannah, model scout Evana Patterson, international judge Dina Janse van Rensburg, and Salute Hair director Carl Manderson.

The judges said that the calibre was very high this year, with very fluent and well spoken contestants.

One contestant, Nafeesa Moses, already holds a master’s degree, and both Miss van Dyke and Miss Wellington, Regan Hillyer, are studying toward theirs.

The show was MCed by TVNZ's Matt McLean and Miss Universe New Zealand 2008 Samantha Powell.

Katie Taylor, Miss Universe New Zealand 2009, delivered a touching speech on her experiences since her own crowning last April.