Nigel Benson

The Dunedin Fringe Festival got a bit X-rated yesterday.

The 2009 Dunedin Fringe Festival opened with a big bang in the Octagon yesterday.

Colourful characters have been flocking to the city for the Dunedin Fringe Festival, which starts tomorrow.

The 2009 Dunedin Heritage Festival last night packed up its knickerbockers and winklepickers for another two years.

Dunedin's three main festivals may be in for a strong dose of direction if the Dunedin City Council prescribes better planning for events generally thought to overlap rather than dovetail cohesively.

Three Dunedin men were presented with the inaugural Dunedin Heritage Trust Bluestone Awards last night.

Organisers of the Dunedin Heritage Festival joked they could not have had more appropriate conditions for the festival at the weekend.

The 2009 Dunedin Heritage Festival dusted off two years of accumulated cobwebs and strode out into the Octagon yesterday.

Dunedin's cultural institutions, the Dunedin Public Art Gallery and the Otago Settlers Museum, were until recently corralled together under a single director. That relatively short-lived experiment in centralisation has ended with the appointment of two new directors, one for each.

The Dunedin Heritage Festival will feature a world premiere this weekend when the Southern Sinfonia performs Anthony Ritchie's A Portrait of Frances Hodgkins.

Champion of culture Charles Brasch is the focus of this year's Dunedin Heritage Festival. Nigel Benson discovers a man who cared.

It will be ballet with all the best bits when the Royal New Zealand Ballet's biennial showcase "Tutus on Tour" wheels into town next week.

The pen is mightier than the sword. It's even been known to take on the machine gun. Nigel Benson talks to David Howard about the power of poetry.

A group of Dunedin poets will go to sea later this month.

He's captained a Russian submarine, been chased by dinosaurs and in his latest film is reincarnated as a dog.

He's l'enfant terrible of New Zealand art. Nigel Benson pulls the devil's mask off Ben Webb.

His painted words are the song of a canary in a cultural coal mine. Nigel Benson meets autistic "outsider" artist John Patrick McKenzie.

Some of the most spectacular glass art made in New Zealand over the past year is to be shown at an exhibition opening in Dunedin next week.