By Daniel Wirtheim, Features Editor

Published in print Oct.22, 2014

On Oct. 11, Elsewhere Living Art Museum hosted their annual fundraising event. This one had a winter theme, a last great winter theme.

Ever since its conception, Elsewhere has closed for the winter season, mostly due to the building’s 1930’s construction that lacks proper insulation or heating fixtures. But this is all coming to an end after the 2014 winter, when the building will be restored to accommodate artists all year long.

Tickets to The Last Great Winter were $50 and $35 for students or artists. Valerie Wiseman, the communications curator explained that an artist could be anyone but had to “show some intention.”

Along with a ticket came access to open bars on all three floors and food that was catered by Table 16, a new-age gourmet restaurant on Elm Street.

Above the main entrance, a giant ice cube suspended from the ceiling melted into a bucket.

Each drop set off a motion sensor that played a recording, some sort of biblical scripture about water and the creation of the universe. Noise and congregations of people were on every floor and spilled into the open back area behind the museum.

On the first floor, a four-piece Americana band, Modern Robot, played the soundtrack to a Charlie Chaplin film. A livid, stomping blue-grass band filled the second floor and an upbeat electronic group, Quilla, played the third.

Ice fishers stuck their hooks down a hole drilled through the floor, a yeti threw hand-sewn snowballs and a campfire burned outside, by which a storyteller read Christmas books.

But where language fails to adequately describe this atmosphere of constant stimulation, the symbolic motifs of a group of psychedelic

puppeteers may provide a better medium.

At 11 a.m. Poncili Creacion, a traveling puppet show from Puerto Rico, performed in a clearing on the first floor, coming out of a cardboard television.

There were five of them in total. Five young men dressed in all black, three of whom had the middle portion of their hair buzzed off, leaving marginal sides of long dark hair that followed each flowing movement on the makeshift stage.  The performers looked goofy, yet important. They looked professional. While the puppeteers moved their puppets, their faces were expressive and dramatic.

The puppets were foam and painted in bright colors. Each one formed multiple creatures. The metamorphosis of the puppets was the most astonishing aspect of the show. There were a few moments of noise, shuffling and suddenly a puppet would swallow another, or produce arms from within, creating a larger puppet.

“This is all possible because we went to sleep and thought it in a dream,” said Jean-Michael Vissepo, a member of the surrealist puppeteer group. There was conviction in his voice, as if it were a sure thing.

It all adds to the ethos of the strange museum at 606 South Elm Street. The crowd is diverse, but almost exclusively community invested people.

The Forge, Greensboro’s first maker-space has recently opened up behind Elsewhere, soon to be followed by Gibb’s Hundred Brewing Company.

South Elm is coming together, maybe becoming the most human and community invested district of Greensboro’s downtown.

They were all there, the shakers and movers and the sad artists. They shared stories and drank into the night as slowly but surely, drip-by-drip, the giant ice cube melted.