Once you've achieved that feat of imagination you will begin to imagine Sian Watson's Drongo, a hard-to-forget sculpture in the ANU School of Art Graduating Exhibition.

Sometimes you go to a gallery and particular exhibits seem to stalk you. In that famous Pete and Dud sketch Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, at a gallery, feel that the bottoms of Rubens' voluptuous female nudes are following them. And Drongo, though standing, grazing in a corner, does seem to somehow follow one around the School of Art Gallery. He is very big (he is literally, about the height of the famously tall Phar Lap) and is so dramatically gaunt that you feel you want to come back to the exhibition next day and bring him some apples and a nice nosebag of something nutritious.

And so, when we got to talk to Sian Watson (she has just graduated with a double, Honours degree of Bachelor of Arts/Bachelor of Visual Arts) about Drongo we were half expecting a melancholy chat about the poor beast's plight.

Instead the artist, cheerful as anything (and owner of six real, voluptuous horses where she lives, near Hall), explains that she has only made him so gaunt because she didn't want to portray a "nurturing" animal. Nor did she want want it to resemble any of the famous flattering portraits of horses, like the ones George Stubbs used to paint.

And the concept of a horse with milkable teats came to her she reveals after a month spent in a remote pocket of Indonesia and trying to explain to a farmer there what a horse was. When he found that you can't milk horses he wondered why on earth one would bother to have a farm animal that gave no milk. Into her mind drifted the idea of a horse with some milkable qualities.

She doesn't want to over-explain Drongo and loves the idea that everyone who encounters him (and she confirms that she does think of Drongo as a him) will have different ideas about what he is, what he might mean.

She testifies that the stained fabric of his wrinkled skin is made from second hand curtains she got at an Op Shop and then impregnated with actual horse hair from one of her own steeds. Chicken wire and liquid nails too were employed in fashioning this haunting brute.

The Graduating Exhibition (please take Drongo an apple) continues at the School of Art until December 6.

The Graduating Exhibition is just one flake in the blizzard of the present and imminent arts attractions in this pulsating metropolis. The Australian who is tired of Canberra is weary of life.

Looming, contrasting extravaganzas (for variety is what we expect of a big city) include the "Bollywood Dance Spectacular" Straight Outta Bollywood and the Canberra Choral Society's Handel's Messiah.

Tobias Cole's Canberra Choral Society is so pathbreaking that one feels sure it will one day present a Bollywood Messiah. But for the moment this December's Bollywood dancing and the Messiah will be at different venues.

The person who is bored by Bollywood dancing is bored by life and Krisha Jilson-Naduvathucherry of the Canberra School of Bollywood Dancing (CSBD) alerts us to this Saturday's Straight Outta Bollywood. All proceeds will aid the children-with-cancer charity Ronald McDonald House Canberra.

She promises, shyly, that "Featuring more than70 dancers from tiny tots to adults, this turbo-charged, joyfully uplifting show is a riot of swirling colours, high-energy music and sensational dance scenes. A stylish fusion of Bollywood routines will be performed to some of the hottest Bollywood hits. Come and see the dancers with gorgeous colourful costumes and captivating choreography that will have you dancing".

Readers, how exhilarating to know that Canberra has a School of Bollywood dancing! It is part of that suite of things (that includes a symphony orchestra, a national league ice hockey team, botanical gardens and a dashing newspaper) that a true, broad-shouldered, multicultural city must have if it is to dare to call itself a city.

In our picture dancers from the School are shown last week marking Diwali the Indian festival of lights by being turbo-charged and joyfully uplifting in the Marble Hall of Parliament House.

With comparable shyness Canberra Choral Society's Kelly Corner trills that Handel's Messiah "is the most performed performed piece of choral music ever written".

There are traditions to be observed with the Messiah but this December 12 one will embrace novelties. They will include special lighting effects and, Kelly Corner tantalises, "Tobias is well-known for finding ways to get audiences to participate in concerts, so there may be more than just standing involved in the Hallelujah Chorus!"

Tantalisingly, she will neither confirm nor deny that this something "more" is some Bollywood dancing.

It is not a comparison we would have thought of but tenor Christopher Lincoln Bogg, a soloist in this Messiah and a veteran Messiah warbler enthuses that "Messiah is like The Sound of Music, an enduring favourite that fills you with the urge to sing."

Yes, the Llewellyn Hall will be alive with the sounds of Handel.

Straight Outta Bollywood is at the ANU Art Centre from 6pm to 8.15pm on Saturday, December 5. Tickets from trybooking.com http://www.trybooking.com/JQEI·

The Canberra Choral Society's Messiah is at the Llewellyn Hall on Saturday, December 12. Book through Ticketek.