The Dunedin Fringe Festival is one of New Zealand's most beloved open-access arts festivals, held each March in the university city of Ōtepoti Dunedin. Over two weeks, it fills the city's bars, galleries, theatres, halls and unexpected spaces with theatre, comedy, music, circus, visual art and performance that ranges from student work to professional productions — all united by the fringe spirit of creative risk-taking and community welcome.
Dunedin has always had a strong arts culture, shaped by its university, its history and its particular character as a city that values ideas, creativity and a certain proud eccentricity. The Fringe Festival distils this character into two weeks of concentrated creative energy, giving artists at every level a platform and audiences an extraordinary range of experiences to choose from. The open-access model means that anyone can participate, and the result is a programme that is gloriously diverse and occasionally surprising.
For visitors to Dunedin in March, the Fringe Festival is one of the best possible reasons to make the journey south. The combination of great venues, passionate audiences, student energy and the particular beauty of Dunedin in autumn makes it one of the most rewarding festival experiences in New Zealand — a reminder that some of the country's finest creative energy lives far from Auckland.