What do you think art is?

Electronic experimentation? Micro-theatre? Live installation? Sixties gatherings? Zines?

Well, this is it. Or it's not. It's This Is Not Art, Newcastle's annual festival of the not-arts, on during the October long-weekend.

For ten years running, This Is Not Art (TINA) has defined the snot-nosed defiance that you can see in all great independent, emerging and experimental art - a crackling passion and chortling wit that the fringe-dwellers of Canberra trek up to Newcastle to enjoy on an annual basis. This year, festival-goers can enjoy a selection of short films about zombies, a DIY pinhole camera workshop, a Great Gatsby Ball, and several ventures by emerging Canberra and ex-Canberra arts makers.

One such venture is the Crack Theatre Festival. Along with Sound Summit (electro and hip-hop music), the National Young Writers Festival, Critical Animals (academes), and Electrofringe (electronic art), Crack is one of five separate festivals which enjoy the protective shade of the This Is Not Art umbrella.

Crack came about two or so years ago, after a National Young Writers Festival coordinator "decided to introduce a performance stream", says David Finnigan, co-curator of Crack 2009. The idea was to "shake up the structure", says Finnigan, of the NYWF. Crack did this by staging "interventions" - raids on events, with performers breaking into conferences and venues to striptease confreres or drink cups of wee.

"That was Crack," says Finnigan.

This year, the NYWF have handed over control of Crack, allowing it to emerge as a festival in its own right. Finnigan and co-curator Gillian Schwab have kept Crack's original aim of staging interventions into the highbrow, but have added further depth (and perhaps a little more gravitas) to the festival - there are workshops, forums and panels on theatre and performance arts, skits, guerilla performances, and several fully-staged performance pieces including a few showcase performances, including Canberran Cathy Petocz's installation The Booth, gypsy band Mr Fibby's Little Girl Lost In The Devil's Black Beard and Sydney group the DeConverters's Witness in the Wall.

Canberra audiences are familiar with Mr Fibby but may not have heard of the DeConverters, a Sydney-based ensemble that combines video and sound art with physical performance. Their latest work Witness in the Wall is an hour long "exploration of surveillance," explains Finnigan, a lush, cinematic playscape that delves into what happens when, as with Google Earth, everyone can be tracked.

Fifty artists will participate in around 45 events over the four days of the festival - no mean feat for an event with no funding apart from TINA's in-kind support.

"No artist is getting paid," says Finnigan. "No one is getting anything from it except what they put in."

What these artists put in seems to be quite a lot. One of the big events of Crack is Playground, a performance party curated by Mr Fibby frontman Hadley and Thomas Henning of Melbourne's The Black Lung Theatre. Playground has been imagined like "a 1960s gathering," a "chaos party" where every single one of the Crack participants will perform. Ex-Canberra muso and former BMA scribe Nick McCorriston is providing sound installation while the other performers - from ex-Canberra theatre company MOSAT to gender-dance-battle-collective SNAG to Finnigan himself will provide capsule performances.

"There'll be moments when everything focuses on one event, and then everything will explode out [...] it'll become looser and looser as the night goes on."

Crack encapsulates the multiplicity of art - an acceptance that art occurs on all levels, from emetic Judy Garland tributes to the "highbrow, poetic, post-dramatic" Revelation or Bust by Anna Barnes.

Tim Dwyer is another Canberra arts maker heading up to TINA who embraces this notion wholeheartedly. While finishing his honours year at the ANU School of Art Dwyer, who has exhibited work at M16 recently, stumbled across cult US public access telly show, Let's Paint TV - and its host John Kilduff.

If you haven't seen LPTV (And you can see clips on YouTube), the show revolves around a distinctly modern DIY aesthetic: when it comes to art - just like making over your house or backyard - "you can actually just do it." Kilduff's schtick is that he paints while doing all manner of other things - making lunch, on the telephone, running on a treadmill - he has "full body involvement" in painting.

"It doesn't carry all the hoity-toity pretentiousness of the art world," says Dwyer. "He engages with a lot of high-end theoretical stuff," but in the end, "the message is the medium."

"He's a motivational force."

Kilduff was so inspiring that Dwyer got in contact with him and invited him out to Australia, to participate in TINA and in a separate show at Canberra Contemporary Art Space later in October. Like Crack's Playground, Dwyer's TINA venture is visioned like a chaos party, a "weird synaesthesia happening" in a small performance space, over two days of the festival.

Kilduff will perform "almost side-by-side, at the same time" with a variety of Oz artists including Melbourne electronic artist Opticalize. There will be group painting sessions led by Kilduff, "almost like a gym class, motivating people into painting."

"We want an overwhelming sensory experience," says Dwyer.

That seems to be the name of the game at This Is Not Art - to overload your senses and your aesthetic, to push beyond the everyday conception of What Art Is. Mostly, what these Canberra artmakers show is that art is exactly what you make it.

This Is Not Art hits Newcastle on the October long weekend (1st to 5th, to be exact). For info about TINA head to www.thisisnotart.org.

For info about Crack Theatre Festival, head to www.cracktheatrefestival.com.

John Kilduff will also be in Canberra Wed 7 Oct @ CCAS Gorman House with a host of other local and interstate performers.

It's been a big year for the Canberra Repertory Society, and it's about to get bigger with their new production of Christopher Hampton's Les Liaisons Dangereuses, directed by the formidable Duncan Driver.

"It's the most dramatic and challenging script," says Driver. "His dialogue and pacing of the scenes shows a playwright who has a brilliant conception of what works on stage."

The play is set shortly before the French Revolution, in a society run by and for the decadent. It tells the tale of the Marquise de Mertuil and Vicomte de Valmont, two aristocratic rivals engaged in a cruel game of humiliation, sex and - ultimately - revenge.

Driver seems confident that the show is going to wow the Canberran audience. "The audience can expect lots of stuff - drama, tragedy, comedy, action, a gripping and intense swordfight, male and female nudity, some beautiful classical and early romantic music, sumptuous costumes, a gorgeous set...and lots of plot twists and turns that will keep people interested right to the end of the play."

Rep's Theatre 3 will be home to a truly unique set, with a real tree at the back of the stage (donated generously by the ANU), and some detailed set pieces. "It's not a box set if you know what I mean. It's a very spacious set...the theatre stage is enormous and we tried to take advantage of the depth and width as much as possible," Driver says.

The cast has been picked from some of Canberra's finest actors, including Duncan Ley, who co-founded Everyman Theatre with Driver. "I had an enormous number of people to choose from - two full days worth of auditions blacked out in the diary. It's a matter of undertaking lots and lots of people, and it's not an easy job to turn some of those people down when you have a great wealth of actors to draw a selection from. Hampton wrote the character dialogue so well that it does a lot of the work for the actors." Also stepping out are acclaimed Canberra actresses Hannah Ley and Lexi Sekuless, last seen in Papermoon's Medea.

Driver sees Les Liaisons Dangereuses as very relevant to today's society. "You can see it as a historical artifact, one that details a society that is crumbling because of its own decadence. And that's relevant to a lot of times, especially the 1980s when the play came out.  It's really relevant to this time as well because a lot of people are greedy and spiteful."

Out of the four plays that Driver could have chosen from to direct this season, he chose Les Liaisons Dangereuses for its intriguing plot, and brilliantly witty dialogue. Says the director: "I think it's the best play."

Les Liaisons Dangereuses plays at Theatre 3 until October 3. Performances 8pm Thursday - Saturday, Sat matinees @ 2pm, Sunday twilights @ 5pm. Tix $35/$37. Call 62571950 for details and to book.

TANK is a series of six short plays about our relationship to water. Promising pirates, puppets, polar bears and Paris Hilton, TANK is presented by Canberra Youth Theatre and will debut at Floriade this year. 

TANK is the brain child of CYT artistic director Pip Buining, and written by Canberra local Hadley, and aims to present relevant and topical issues about water conservation in a fun, quirky fashion. Each of the plays has a distinct and separate story, but they all share characters and, of course, the common theme of water. 

Hadley talked to groups of 7-12 year olds to gain inspiration for the project. "The young people here do express concern about environmental issues," says Pip. "They are interested in having a voice and speaking up about things that concern them. We wanted to create a work that gave them a voice." So does that explain the mysterious references to Martians and meerkats on the TANK posters? "Their sense of theatricality is really present in the types of characters that turn up," Pip agrees.

The story centres around a 'Museum of Water', and a water historian who is the caretaker of the museum. The requisite bad guy is his arch-nemesis 'Gramps', and the six different stories unfold when Gramps' niece and her friend go to visit the museum. To understand how a crazy rat and a fork-on-a-stick weave their way into that theatrical back-drop, well, you'll have to go along and find out.

One of the most exciting things about TANK (besides pirates and crazy rats) is that it's actually staged inside a water tank (because when CYT do a theme, they really do a theme). An intimate portable theatre, the tank seats only six audience members at a time. Pip tells me, "Everyone in there gets direct address; everyone gets a story told to them." The proximity of the audience to the actors is an important element of the performance, and adds to TANK's unique charm.  Hadley agrees: "It's a really cosy space to be in - it's very warm."

The plays will be presented in a cyclical manner, and the small audience capacity means that patrons may have to line up several times if they want to see all six plays. Entertainment will be provided for those waiting in line, however, with a mini-ensemble of 10-13 year-old 'water historians' interacting with the crowd and performing street theatre. Of course, the performances will be free to the public, in line with CYT's policy of 'access and equity' to theatre.

"For some people it might be their first theatrical experience," says Pip. "We hope it will be the first of many".

TANK plays at Floriade, Commonwealth Park, at 10am, 11am and 12 noon on 13, 20, 26 and 27 September & at 2pm, 3pm and 4pm on 12 & 19 September.