Aerial circus artists, a Hula-Hoop dancer and local bands welcomed in the colourful twoweek showcase of music, theatre and madcap mayhem.
It is the first year the Fringe Festival has been run as a standalone event, after traditionally being run in tandem with the Otago Festival of the Arts every second year.
Organisers were biting their nails earlier in the day as an afternoon deluge of heavy rain threatened to spoil the party.
‘‘We were a wee bit anxious,'' festival director Paul Smith later admitted.
However, the clouds cleared and the reception was more than encouraging as a crowd of about 300 people gathered in the Otago Museum Reserve for the opening festivities.
Rolling spotlights lit up trees around the reserve, creating a scene suggestive of a UFO landing.
Human cats wandered purring through the crowd and many other onlookers, both young and old, had also dressed up for the occasion.
An out-of-town first-year university student, who appeared to be still getting reorientated after Orientation, did his best to sum up the proceedings.
‘‘This Orientation stuff is great. Dunedin rocks, man.''
Aerialists Tom Beauchamp and Pascal Ackermann, of Wellington-based circus cabaret troupe Fuse Productions, wowed the crowd as they wove rope tricks high in the air.
The undoubted star of the show was the seductively serpentine Magenta Diamond (Tanya Drewery), surely the finest Hula-Hoop exponent to grace Dunedin in many years.
Master of ceremonies Vinyl Burns (Kim Potter) also raised a cheer when he sang Guns N' Roses' classic Sweet Child of Mine on a unicycle with a ukelele.
Dunedin bands The Tweeks and Onanon also contributed sets which could only have been made in Dunedin.
‘‘Maybe we should do a happy song,'' Onanon guitarist Glen Ross said. ‘‘Oh, we don't have any happy songs.''
You had to laugh.
The only puzzle was the presence of dozens of people in orange day-glo vests with ‘‘Security'' written across their backs. It just looked so un-Fringe. They had absolutely nothing to do, so they stood around talking in orange pods. But the Fringe is back. Get out there and enjoy it.