Club Universal is a new work for five dancers choreographed by Greenwich Dance Agency's artist-in-residence, Temujin Gill. Gill, formerly a member of the Jiving Lindy Hoppers, founded Temujin Dance Company 10 years ago. He specialises in lindy hop, hip-hop and contact improvisation. These styles, combined with a soundtrack of hip-hop, jazz and world music, form a work that explores contemporary themes of power struggles, territorial disputes, adaptation and co-operation. Londoner Gill studied dance at Lewisham College and then at London Contemporary Dance School. This gDA / SBC commission is all the more exciting as this is a choreographer who began his dance education locally in south-east London. Lindy hop has made a recent comeback with the rise of the London burlesque scene but is not usually on the menu for contemporary dance commissions -- it is precisely this unique approach to choreography that makes this a must-see show.

It starts with a spectacular walk from East India Quay DLR (do leave in good time) into the semi-industrial maze of concrete and water overlooking the Millennium Dome. Destination Trinity Buoy Wharf is a place in between city and sea, charged with a feeling of the uncanny. That feeling engulfs you as you walk into a bar made out of wallpaper, punched with peepholes that hint at what lies in wait. Goat and Monkey Theatre are an electric young company from the same stable as Punchdrunk, but with their own distinctive take on the adventure of the theatrical event, gently playing with the presence of the audience. Strindberg's supernatural tone poem of a play is here transformed into our promenade through a cavernous space, led by the diabolical Mr Hummel. It's disorientatingly dream-like through brilliant tricks of light and space, and occasionally astonishing imagery. The narrative is peopled with surreal grotesques that still are never inhuman, thanks to richly detailed performances especially from Sam Booth and the inimitable Ian Summers. The line between the play and the event is occasionally a little too visible -- but this is the kind of work that grows into itself and your imagination. Well worth a trip into the hinterland.

NB: runs till 16/07 (booking is essential as spaces are limited -- call 07791.602.029 or send an email to sally@goatandmonkey.co.uk).

It's curious how in the early to mid '90s, ethereal and ambient electronic music seemed so revolutionary, as though all the rock throwbacks could be swept away on the tide of history by serious young men with bedroom complexions and an abundance of facial hair. Now with hindsight you can see the high watermark where the wave broke and rolled back as the fickle music industry decided that rock music was a safer bet in the long run and the electronica scene splintered into a thousand micro-genres. But all is not totally lost, there are still pockets of resistance out there, resisting the temptation of 300bpm amen breaks and distorted gabba that most of the electronica scene has succumbed to. One such pocket is Expanding Records, whose elegantly packaged records contain music of beauty and wonder. This Thursday the label are showcasing several of their latest signings such as Italian duo Modern Institute, who combine electronics and live cello to atmospheric effect; Oblong, the latest project from label boss Benge; and Orla Wren, who, isolated from the distractions of society, crafts exquisite soundscapes in her remote Scottish cottage. Resistance is not futile -- lie down and be counted.

Scuttling into a darkened cinema auditorium on a blazingly hot summer's day has to be one of the best guilty pleasures going. It's a crime made infinitely worse when in the name of a re-run -- but by god it's a good cultural felony if ever there was one. Top of the list this week is the new print screening of Hitchcock's Rebecca (based on the Daphne du Maurier novel) -- a masterpiece of temptation in black and white. Laurence Olivier smoulders as Maxim de Winter, who whisks his mousy little second wife back to his grand Cornwall home, Manderley, where the mystery surrounding the death of his late wife, the enigmatic Rebecca, unsettles the newlywed's blissful existence.

NB: this new print of Rebecca is screening at the NFT from 30/06 till 13/07.

After 50 years of directing B-movies -- hard-boiled Yakuza gangsters a specialty, Quentin Tarantino a major fan -- 83-year-old cult Japanese director Seijun Suzuki (Tokyo Drifter, Pistol Opera) recently decided to expand his genre repertoire -- having a go at musicals, fantasy, romantic comedy, fairy tales and anime. All at once. Add a little Kabuki, a wee bit of Noh, some tap-dancing, a smattering of rap and calypso, a wicked and vain Lord of the Castle, a pair of star-crossed lovers, a cobweb fight and a CGI "virtual performance" by the late Japanese hit-singer Hibari Misora (who died in 1989) and you get a little idea of the delirious, delicious and totally un-classifiable Princess Raccoon. Zhang Ziyi (Memoirs Of A Geisha) stars as the Japanese-singing / Mandarin-speaking Princess of the magical "tanuki" world, who falls in love with an exiled human prince. Does love conquer all? Is the vain Lord really the most beautiful? Will the hero recover the golden Frog of Paradise? And is it possible to tap-dance in a kimono? Fantastical, witty, flamboyant and absolutely guaranteed to be like nothing else you have ever seen.

NB: Princess Racoon is released in London at the ICA on 30/06 and screens till 27/07 (a retrospective season of Suzuki's films will follow in July at the ICA).

Forty Shades Of Blue is a complex love story focusing on a lonely Russian woman who lives with an ageing blues-music legend in Memphis. When his son comes to visit she is moved by how different he is to his aggressive and loud father, and we witness the inevitable, slow movement of the characters falling for each other. The film's strongest quality is the acting -- intense performances from Rip Torn as the foul-tempered musician Alan James, Darren Burrows as the confused son and Dina Korzun (from Last Resort) as the stony-faced Russian beauty are captivating to watch. Director Ira Sachs gives the scenes an atmospheric look by using a lot of natural light and keeping the camera still for most of the scenes, with sudden cuts adding to the arty feel of the film. The complexity of the script never gives way to easy resolutions, and though it has moments where gaps in the story leave too much of the story for the audience to fill in, the strength of the acting keeps the film from losing momentum. Though the score can be too emotionally overbearing at times, Sachs' film still remains an affecting journey into the lives of two lonely people living in the shadow of a tyrannical and successful musician.

NB: Forty Shades Of Blue is released in London on 30/06.

Escape for a night to the streets of Havana this Friday, courtesy of the V&A, which is staging an evening of art, performance, film and music as an exotic complement to its exhibition Che Guevara: Revolutionary And Icon. The line up includes documentaries from Cuba, a mural painting session in the Madejski Gardens by Guantanamo-born Raul Speek, performance art by Coco Fusco, icon tagging by Gavin Turk, curator-led tours of the Che exhibition, plus some hip-wiggling beats from Cuban reggaeton collectives Cafe Mezclado, Stylo Prohibido and DJ Greenpapi. For the genuine Cuban experience order yourself a mojito, tuck into some sofrito, smoke a cigar and don't forget your revolutionary beret.

NB: Che Guevara: Revolutionary And Icon runs till 28/08.

What is it about rave, acid, booty bass and so on that attracts the upmarket cerebral, Braindance-going electronica-ites? They're some of the most primally fulfilling, simple, driven-by-instinct musical forms that exist. Surely something a bit more challenging, like free jazz or German minimalism, would be more appropriate. Anyhow, electro, ghetto-tech, acid, rave, hardcore, old-school and techno fans are in for yet another treat as The Coronet -- the only place in London that KF has been where you actually have to go in past the bins and up stairs that smell of bleach to get to certain rooms -- is overtaken by Rephlex for a night of fun courtesy of Cylob, Ceephax, the awesome DMX Crew, hot name The Plastician and more. Riffs, drops, squelches, bleeps and punishing b-lines delivered at colon-pulverising levels -- what more could a raver ask for?

Sud Electronic continue to provide the very best in undiluted, modern, uptempo dance music. And tonight is a celebration of sorts: the launch party of Body Code's debut album The Conservation Of Electric Charge. Body Code being the pseudonym of Alan Abrahams, who, along with Lakuti, helps run Sud. Having just played DEMF and Sonar, he should still be in the zone to deliver a cracking live set. Also in support live is the excellent Lawrence; his album for novamute last year was a musical highlight for us. Expect reflective melodies and considered rhythms all doused in a neon-lit flicker. Finally, minimal house stalwart Jacek Sienkiewicz makes his live UK debut tonight. His records on Trapez and Klang bordered on the genius -- we'll expect nothing less live. Sud Regulars Lakuti, Nick Craddock and Marco Shuttle are on DJ duties.

Does anyone remember back in 2004 a whole big fuss being made about London getting its very own Grand Prix? If you had been standing on Regent Street in July 2004 you would have seen the fast and sleek beasts of Formula One storming their way round the West End -- everyone got excited -- and Livingstone said he wanted us to get a Monaco style circuit. Two years later there is still no more of the Monaco about W1, but the sexy cars are coming to town in a Design Museum special: The Great Design Race (they must have been racking their brains for hours over that title)! These cars are the epitome of design and engineering: they have to comply with severe regulations, they have to keep the driver safe and they have to win. That's why they cost millions, and what do you get when you mix winning with piles of money? Sexiness! So if your design is a bit on the limp side or there is some car-hater you want to convert this should be your next pit stop (oh, aren't we funny)!

NB: runs till 29/10.

For those in need of some quick fix simian action (and who knows who is on the look out these days), there's always the option of digging out the Sigourney Weaver classic Gorillas In The Mist. For something a little more outre, a little more interactive, a little sexier (but no less feisty), try stiletto-clad women in fancy-dress gorilla masks. Since 1985, the Guerrilla Girls have been taking up arms against the bigoted curators, patronising critics and priggish clowns of the art world whose combined force maintains an embarrassingly low quota of art by women on display in the world's biggest galleries (hence the girls' infamous slogan "Do Women Have To Be Naked To Get Into The Met. Museum?"). The girls are making a flying visit to the UK, to scrutinise our impressive collections with a feminist eye. The question is: how will Tate Modern fare after the recent UBS re-hang? Time to find out...

NB: no bookings taken -- seated on a first-come, first-served basis.

You arrive at Alexandra Palace, and follow a path behind the ice rink. The shell of an old theatre meets the evening sky. You ring a doorbell at your appointed time you pass along a rubble-strewn pathway to enter suddenly into a red velvet foyer of the theatre's past. Here an usher tells you about the performance "running early", that there will be periods of total darkness but that you shouldn't be scared (and that you will see Gracie Fields). Everything the usher tells you is true. Even the Chinese lions, as she says "beautiful but -- when you're alone -- terrifying", hold that same promise for you too as you finally are called into a pitch-black space of unknown size as sole audience. What follows is unnerving but transfixing, as the ghost of a theatre shows itself to you as it was and is, an empty space that cannot be. Fevered Sleep's installation is sumptuous but meticulously restrained and therefore -- especially in a closing image that is haunting us still -- extraordinarily resonant, even tender. Brilliant.

NB: runs till 22/07 (booking is essential as spaces are limited -- call 020.8369.5454 or go to artsdepot.co.uk for tickets).

If you have any bones to pick with a certain Mr Brown (oh, say "defence" or your tax bill) this will not be the right time to vocalise. You see, because the fabulous New Designers is celebrating 21 years of showing off the best new upstarts across 20 design disciplines, Brown is being wheeled out to open Part I. Ceramics, textiles, fashion, jewellery and lots of other gorgeous adorning bits are this parts' focus, giving you the opportunity to get your mitts on classics of the future (Lulu Guinness and Westwood watch out). Then Part II, opened by Kevin McCloud, takes us onto product, furniture, graphic and even theatre design, so it's a must for anyone who wants to see potential Design Museum exhibitors of the future, say the next Jonathan Ive or Jamie Hewlett. Whatever you think of the future of the honorary guest, if you're the gambling type the careers of these new designers are a safer bet!

NB: New Designers 2006 runs 29/06 till 02/07 (Part I) and from 06/07 till 09/07 (Part II).

Skin Shakers is the SBC's mixed programme of new works by artists and choreographers, many of whom will be new to London audiences. This weekend features three new works: Dramatic Miniatures, a duet by Finnish choreographer Jyrki Karttunen; kaihokaksi (longing 2), a solo by Welsh dance maker Tanja Raman; and Viva La Vida, a solo inspired by the life of Frida Kahlo by UK choreographer Josephine Dyer. These live pieces are interspersed with short films by Australian dancer Sue Healey, Austrian Chris Haring and Gina Czarnecki's collaboration with Australian Dance Theatre's Gary Stewart -- using raw footage both of improvisation and choreography mixed with visual art and experimental media. This is the third season of Skin Shakers, and it is curated by SBC head of dance and performance, Julia Carruthers, and producer Sean King. All the artists have track-records of creating work at the very edge of cutting-edge international contemporary dance, so go along with high expectations.

NB: Skin Shakers runs on both 01/07 and 02/07.

To some, film music is incidental (ha!), nothing to make a fuss about, barely noticeable and you certainly don't get much E! News red-carpet coverage for the Oscar winner of Best Score. To others this is an obsession, the type of film punter who sticks behind to read the credits kinda obsession (and if you have ever dated one of these people it can be hard to understand why you are still there sitting in the dark as staff begin to pick popcorn off the carpet)! With Bernard Herrmann this kind of behaviour begins to make sense! Famous for being one of Hitchcock's longstanding collaborators, having worked on over a hundred feature films from Taxi Driver to Citizen Cane, the radio version of Orson Welles' The War Of The Worlds to being mixed into the soundtrack for Tarantino's Kill Bill this talk followed by screening is a must for compulsive credit readers.

NB: this event is part of the Bernard Herrmann Season which runs till 31/07.

For this revival production, the show opens on a set reminiscent of Elmgreen and Dragset installations, both haunting and elegant, where two suburban gardens create a serene and orderly atmosphere that can only announce something tempestuous. A tense and uptight man has developed a love affair with his lawn and gets orgasmic pleasure out of his mowing. Next door the new neighbours are loud, chain-smoking drunkards. The balance is shattered when the newcomers dig a flowerbed across the two adjacent gardens. Through strong movements and a powerful score by Philip Feeney, the cast of seven portray an escalating and bloody garden-fence fight. But whilst the gardens become a battlefield for the adults, they offer a cradle for the burgeoning love between the son of the tense lawn-lover and the daughter of the drunkard newcomers. Although funny and very well timed the first half of the show suffers from too many obvious caricatures, however it lifts itself with a truly moving flying swing scene for the young lovers and from then on the fights turn into fights for life and love and become all the more essential and compelling. Be warned, although loosely based on Romeo And Juliet, the show ends more like Titus Andronicus!

NB: runs till 08/07.

A long overdue celebration of French talent in the contemporary Parisian art scene has reached the shores of the Thames. Tate Modern has gone for the creme de la creme in artist Pierre Huyghe and his forthcoming exhibition Celebration Park. In work that combines the heady charm of French intellectualism and the hard nosed face of the global economy, Huyghe tackles the syrupy treatment of the economics of representation. Through an array of film, installation, architecture and design his work speaks to an audience in the know, to whom "face value" is an outdated modal. Exploring the space between experience and representation in art, he creates a translation, a connective tissue between these states, where audience acts as both performer and knowing spectator. Through Huyghe's work the artist becomes a ventriloquist / magician figure, using a vocabulary that is reinterpreted through another vessel or medium. As the lines between opposing modes of representation are erased, something more fluid, or even a more reactionary creative process, creeps in. What is lost in this constantly revolving translation? Put your questions to the artist as he speaks to critic Mark Godfrey about his work.

NB: Pierre Huyghe: Celebration Park runs till 17/09.

To refer to Adrienne Rich as America's -- perhaps the world's -- leading radical feminist poet would hardly be wrong but might be misleading, if it conjures the image of an ideologist who elevates topicality over imagination. Far from it: Rich is a visionary. Severe and refractory in her wrestling with words, counterposing "the dream of a common language" to "the dark fields of the republic", she is one of the premier inventors of poetic form today and the recipient of nearly every award going bar the Nobel -- and has turned down those that would have compromised her, like the National Medal for the Arts "because the very meaning of art, as I understand it, is incompatible with the cynical politics of this [Clinton] administration". (Imagine what she'd say about Bush.) Rich never lets herself or her public off easy.

John Frumism provides Margate's Turner Contemporary curator Rob Tufnell with an opportunity to indulge in some "hauntology". John Frum is celebrated in the South Pacific for the moment when some Black American GIs were mistaken for deities arrived to liberate the locals. Tufnell is not offering us GIs, mistaken deities nor men in uniforms for that matter; instead the trio of Mike Nelson, Philip Lai and Paul Thek provide a tantalising combination of absence through presence. The great London critic Stuart Morgan once described the late Thek in sad terms, but in fact the eccentric and oft humorous attitude of Thek's posthumous etchings provides a lighter counterpoint to the more physical and forlorn assemblage here. Nelson's home-made hallucinatory objects are "relics" from three imagined lost travellers of Verne's Journey To The Centre Of The Earth. They seem to suggest user-friendly tools: a still, Turkish pipe and acid trap. The Malaysian-born, but London-based, Lai offers us more hermetic albeit poetic objects. His shanty-like structure feels like Rauschenberg meets Judd, while a box of folded old jeans seem to suggest those absent. It is the nearly invisible Nelson installation that you walk through that may come closest to any Johm Frum moment in the show.

NB: runs till 23/07 (Mike Nelson also has a show at Matt's Gallery which runs till 30/07).

With major exhibitions in the last few years in Geneva, Rome, Sydney, San Francisco, Sao Paulo, Oxford, Istanbul and last year in sunny Margate, Mike Nelson has finally returned to Matt's Gallery. AMNESIAC SHRINE or Double coop displacement is a puzzling development from all of these past works. The press release informs that it is a return to The Amnesiacs, a mythical biker gang, who, for a brief period in the mid-'90s, helped Nelson come to terms with loss and have featured in previous works, including his last show at Matt's, The Coral Reef in 2000. The fictional trace of human activity that is normally so heavily crafted by Nelson's placement of materials is minimal in this bare environment, which is punctured by hive-like structures that resemble organic cocoon forms. Nelson has spoken of films such as Clint Eastwood's first Malpaso western High Plains Drifter and the classic Planet Of The Apes as influences in the past. After leaving Matt's, we found ourselves wondering if his new filmic influences could include Nick Park's Chicken Run and Ron Howard''s Cocoon: The Return. An exhibition to dash any presumptions you may have about what to expect from a Mike Nelson installation.

NB runs till 30/07.

Plaid are tricky artists. Their flirtation with extremism as part of the Black Dog left a myriad of musical puzzles which are still being deciphered today. But since the shift and their re-definition as Plaid, their musical codes are easier to break. This is a criticism. They've become generic as the IDM genre itself. But this, Plaid's first album in three years, is a welcome move to re-scramble the signals. This time, they have visuals. Bob Jaroc's superbly executed and intricate films shift through various moods and styles. All doused in analogue decay and imperfections. "War Dialler"'s surveillance paranoia represented in the style of a '60s public information film animation is tense. "I Citizen The Loathsome" explores inner city twilight with accurate clarity against a sonic dense crescendo. "Super Position" is organic rave; pulsating microbes that explore the fields of saturated colour and focus levels. The CNN-blipvert that is "Crumax Rins" is in turns amusing, mesmerising and upsetting, while "New Family" is self-help messages and memories to euphoric techno pop. One of the most complete and satisfying marriages of narrative audio and video that we've seen and should place Plaid back at the top of the Warp league tables.

To buy Greedy Baby online click here.

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