The first festival was staged in 2000, the brainchild of Nicholas McBryde.
This is the first under its new director, Alex Wheeler. People are wondering how it's changed, if it has.
Your columnist found Rita and Douglas poignant. Dave Armstrong's play about the artist Rita Angus and the composer Douglas Lilburn made intelligent use of lopsided material.
Angus' letters to Lilburn through an affair and beyond remain but not his to her. So the performance used his music, played by Michael Houstoun, and projected images of Angus' paintings, all spun around Jennifer Ward-Lealand's Rita, using the artist's soaring, sinking and occasionally searing words as her lines.
I had an unscheduled meeting with Comrade Z in the Railway Station foyer. They claim to be East European but rather resemble a jug band. Their promise to be loud was amply fulfilled but I'm not sure their beards fooled anyone. It's one of the pleasures of the festival that it generates such encounters. I wasn't aware Comrade Z would be playing at the station. This wasn't in the programme. I was going to the show in the Station Gallery which isn't in the programme either.
The Comrades were just felicitously there.
And in Hoyt's Lane I met Daniel Mills who explained to another - and me - how he was going to squeeze another goldfish into his mural because he'd promised so many but was running out of space for them all.
Revolver at Sammy's was not art but daring acrobatics, juggling and flesh.
"Mildly raunchy" I think Nigel Benson put it, which is about right and the show was fun. There were some chance encounters there too, another plus.
Ewan McDougall was at Gallery De Novo on Friday the 5th, brimming with his usual ebullience. He was expatiating on the accident which produced a painting's title and boasting the paint was still wet.
Not far away at Lure, Lynn Kelly's Black Roses is a wonderful rosary contrived ingeniously from rubber.
The festival didn't seem to be lacking weight. How could it be with Michael Houstoun playing Beethoven for 55 minutes solid in the cathedral?
But perhaps it had a new lightness of touch, moments of frivolity even?
I thought this was about to be confirmed at the Fortune on Monday with all the jolly folk of Where We Once Belonged appearing on stage in a gaggle: cheerful, noisy, restless, jesting and giggling Samoan folk. How could they be anything but fun?
Except that among the jokes were things which aren't funny, but brutal, cruel and violent. We were shown they are part of Samoan life too.
And Samuel Beckett's Play, the eight-minute, three actor drama continuously re-performed at the Standard Insurance Building from 5.30pm to 7pm, was unrelieved, brilliant darkness. Beckett always throws in the puzzling and absurd and that was here too, in an impressively commandeered setting. People make hell for themselves through infidelity and the intensity of these three in their purgatory pots is as deeply unsettling as their memoried setting.
All the performances I attended were drawing good audiences and the same was true at the Globe. It was a full house and appreciative for The Middlemarch Singles Ball. The props were substantial and took some shifting and the action took time to gain pace. But we were entertained and our heart strings plucked by Ella West's first adult play.
Hahn Bin, aka Amadeus Leopold, did some string plucking too in his performance on Wednesday. "Till Dawn Sunday" was a medley of Mozart, Ravel and Paganini, not to mention Leonard Bernstein, Frederick Loewe and Harold Arlen, the last three the composers for West Side Story, My Fair Lady and Judy Garland's Over the Rainbow. Hahn Bin played solo violin and Or Matias accompanied him on piano.
There was much, much more. Both were costumed. There were props.
They made a performance of the performance. Hahn Bin was sculpturally coiffed while Matias' hair was long and shaggy. Both played like demons, like angels and the dying, and Hahn Bin died on the stage - but revived! He adopted a persona part Andy Warhol, part David Bowie and strutted, posed and gestured to superlative effect. He wore built-up shoes, a white robe, a black robe. His face is like a statue, or a mask.
He had the audience in his hand from the start. He enthralled them and children were dancing in the aisles, which they don't do for Michael Houstoun. There were standing ovations and three encores.
He is changing the genre. It was wildly impressive. That was my best violin experience ever.
Peter Entwisle is a Dunedin curator, historian and writer.
