HEROIC Canberrans braved the elements on Saturday (March 14) for what MC Allan Sko said would be the last “Art Not Apart” festival to take place in the NewActon precinct.

Clown Anna Thomson contended with freezing temperatures and  a minuscule crowd on the main stage at lunchtime, playing a Fixit character, a bumbling clown trying to make something extraordinary out of the ordinary. Getting her hand out of her pocket became a major exercise, using a spirit level for a phone proved fruitless.

This kind of clowning work relies on close audience contact and Thomson kept up her tight physical discipline even when nearly upstaged by two giant chickens, (or possibly ibises) to reach an imagined crescendo of cascading water.

Next up, Canberra composer Michael Sollis, collaborating with percussionist Thea Rossen presented their new work, “The Milk Carton Confessions,” a satirical work on consumerism and recycling.

Screened behind the performers were Sollis’ interviews with old timers from an era when people recycled elastic bands and also present-day kids who prefer milk to come from cartons while revealing a sense of impending danger from climate change – “we’ll get killed ‘n’ stuff.”

Meantime Rossen used one milk carton as a percussion stick, then another and then more, later rubbing the carton to produce a gentler sound but finally the carton to death in a frenzy of finger-drumming.

More gently, she poured milk into a cereal bowl to the sound of tinkling wind chimes. Your finger drumming, then, demonstrating the musical possibilities of newsprint, she wore, thrashed, tore and stomped on paper sheets.

If NewActon is to be forsaken, than the obvious space for Art Not Apart is the area between the Shine Dome and the National Film And Sound Archive, which livened-up as the sun began to shine, with the “Soul Defender” truck becoming a stage for gigs, the Dome a stage for Canberra Dance Theatre and all around, visual artists and food purveyors showing off their wares.

Inside their NFSA theatrette was a packed out poetry launch, The launch of poet Zoe Anderson’s new book “Under The Skin Of The World,” with illustrations by Helani Laisk and typographic design by Caren Florance.

In the Arc Cinema I viewed Richard James Allen and Marie-Stella McKinney’s hybrid “Text Messages from the Universe.” Beginning with a car accident in a sordid alley, the film footage moves into a different sphere of existence as beautifully-dressed dancers on screen interact or  cut across each other while the poet and choreographer Allen, performs his words live, conjuring up a journey into the “Bardo,” the realm between life and death in traditional Tibetan Buddhism.

I emerged from the Arc Cinema into full sunlight with the sounds of music, the smell of food and the sight of a crowd converging onto the NFSA courtyard suggesting that art had triumphed over the elements.

You can fairly bet that Art Not Apart will be back for its 11th anniversary this time next year.