Live entertainment.
It is as old as the first peal of laughter.
Some of the world's most extraordinary artists are travelling to our kingdom to entertain us.
Masters of their arts, who are coming to embrace, entertain and amaze.
Over the next 10 days, we will be courted by world-renowned acts and some of the very best of our homegrown talent.
The Otago Festival of the Arts is a window that is silvered every two years and becomes a mirror reflecting who we are and what we value as people.
It doesn't deserve to be patronised. It deserves to be saturated.
The festival is the only one in New Zealand that has never run at a loss. That is remarkable testimony to the appreciation Otago has for the arts and its support of the event.
But it clings like a bonsai toa cliff face in these tricky times.
Already, the trust board has made the reluctant decision to pull the pin on Carnival of Souls after lacklustre ticket sales. Funny that, as it was one of the top requests among our reviewers.
However, the Dunedin public is notorious with promoters for being roll-up-at-the-last-minute participants.
"A lot of Dunedin people leave it to the last minute and some people leave it to more than the last minute," a colleague drily observed.
Well, this is different.
Many festival events have already sold out. Make other plans if you had intended to see Billy Bragg or the Beat Girls.
If the festival is to be enduringly successful, people might sometimes have to settle for tickets to their third-choice event, because their first two choices have already sold out.
The Otago Daily Times will be joining in the fun over the next 10 days with comprehensive daily coverage of the festival.
We have a equally eclectic team of reviewers, who will be bringing the shows alive for readers.
Veteran festival reviewers Elizabeth Bouman, Barbara Frame, Marian Poole and Nigel Zega are joined this year by Otago University contemporary music lecturer Ian Chapman and Radio One host Aaron Hawkins.
Every night winds up at the Late Night Festival Club, in the Dunedin Public Art Gallery.
There, you will bump into the artists and can swap stories with other show-goers.
Indeed, the festival club usually provides much of the fodder for this column.
A warm Dunedin welcome to our visiting artists, too, who come from all corners of the globe and will return there with their fables of faraway Dunedin.
Just as they make an indelible impression on us, so our wonderfully creative and special little city does on them.
The 2012 Otago Festival of the Arts is here.
Jump on the conga line and get join in the fun.
