Rambert comes back to the Wells with an eclectic triple bill. In Merce Cunningham's Pond Way the dancers' repetitive movements shimmer in front of Roy Lichtenstein's set. A pair of lights, red on one side of the stage and a blue on the other, create a tense landscape, in which the performers navigate their way subtly and playfully to Brian Eno's abstract sounds. The second piece borrows the colour of its costumes from a contemporary lingerie collection and its dance from the quadrille tradition, with the set in sombre contrast. This contrast heightens the beauty of Mozart's Gran Partita in this new work by American choreographer Karole Armitage. Anatomica #3 by Canadian Andre Gingras is more daring and fun. The stage, partly covered with mattresses, is graced by 18 hilarious incarnations of the Queen complete with pink below-the-knee coat dress and handbag. Eventually she joins a street youth for a fantastic hip-hop battle which seems to announce a new departure for Rambert. An ensemble movement has the 18 dancers pulling up their shirts to expose their chests only to pause in a silent moment that oscillates between sheer beauty and cruelty. And we are reminded of our fascination for the body as an object of cult. What a bouncy show this is!

NB: Rambert Dance Company performs at Sadler's Wells till 26/05.

Leaves Of Glass is an interesting season opener from the Soho Theatre's new artistic director, Lisa Goldman. Philip Ridley's play centres on the emotional struggle for survival between two brothers. The elder, Steven, is the successful owner of a graffiti removal company, while the younger, Barry, is a troubled artist, who seems to grasp the bottle more frequently than the brush. In their differences lies the rub. It's clear there's a tumultuous back-story that the two are fighting to come to terms with, and elliptical references hint at a darkness that neither brother dares confront. Steven is tense and taught; the man is wound so tightly that every interaction with his family seems brittle and forced. His soliloquies hold the disjointed scenes together as he explores the tensions doing battle in his head. Ben Whishaw as Steven has an angular glamour and, starkly lit from above, his hollowed cheeks and slight frame give these speeches a haunting pregnancy. What eventually emerges, in a dramatic candlelit denouement in Steven's basement, is a monstrous truth that pushes each sibling to the edge of reason, from which point only one can survive. This is a tricky play, not one for the good-time theatre goer, certainly, but that sets out to tease, provoke and unsettle with poignant and powerful directness.

NB: runs till 26/05.

Festival fever arrives again at Tate Modern for the second May Day Long Weekend, largely focusing on works that overturn the codes and iconography of cinema and performance, music and technology. Anticipating audiences of over 100,000 visitors for this veritable variety show of unconventional works, perhaps it's a suggestion of how we might consume culture in the future, especially in our downloadable hyperactive age. Below are some of the weekend's highlights:

Fri 25/05 (10am - 6pm) and Sat 26/05 (10am - 6pm)
French artist Mathieu Briand turns the Turbine Hall into a gigantic sound installation: SYS*011.Mie>AbE/SoS\SYS*010, also handily known as the Spiral. Consisting of five turntables with the ability to cut new records and record the output, artists including Charlie Dark, The Bug (in collaboration with The Spaceape), Radioactive Man and dubmeister Sprawl impresario si-cut.db have been invited to perform with the system, creating works to explore the possibilities of studio as performance.

Fri 25/06 (9pm)
Ikue Mori, former drummer with legendary NYC no wave dissonant rock group DNA, now a celebrated laptop computer performer, performs live to four films by American exploratory filmmaker Maya Deren, whose reflective illusory work joins the dots between voodoo, ritual, John Cage, Andre Breton and Marcel Duchamp.

Sat 26/05 (9pm)
Everyone's favourite industrial pop-pickers Throbbing Gristle, former "wreckers of civilisation", now reformed after a 25 year hiatus, present their toxic live soundtrack to rarely seen experimental Super 8 films by England's greatest underground visionary filmmaker Derek Jarman. (Returns only for this performance.)

Sun 27/05 (7:30pm) to Mon 28/05 (3:45pm)
With Andy Warhol's work now breaking all records for sales -- his Green Car Crash recently sold for $71.7m at Christie's -- here's the opportunity to experience his first film, Sleep (1963), an epic five-and-a-half-hour film of poet John Giorno asleep, a soporific work that clearly influenced Sam Taylor-Wood's film of a sleeping Beckham. Accompanying this screening (looping over 18 hours for this night) will be a live performance of original ambient composer Erik Satie's "Vexations" (1893), a work that is scored to be repeated 840 times, performed here in piano relay by Gavin Bryars and Michael Nyman, amongst others. Bring a pillow and keep a head count -- the premiere allegedly drew a crowd of nine people, two of whom left within the first 30 minutes!

Mon 28/05 (9pm - 11pm)
The festivities culminate in a grand abstraction of sound and image in the Turbine Hall with a selection of multi-media performances. Japanese artist Ryoichi Kurokawa creates extraordinarily delicate and alluring "spatial-time sculptures" that use light and sound in hypnotic ways, whilst Japanese reductionist Sachiko M works with pure sine waves and the no-input mixing board, to create highly charged fragile works that place more emphasis on sound texture than on musical structures.

In addition, a host of free happenings take place all over the weekend, amongst them Brazilian artist Marepe's spectacular giant carousel with toffee apples, and for the child in us all (Sun 27/05 and Mon 28/05), Helio Oiticica's Parangoles wearable artworks made of textile materials and found objects (Mon 28/05, 1:30 - 5pm).

NB: the UBS Long Weekend 2007 runs for four days from 25/05 till 28/05.

Adapted from a Raymond Carver short story (the same one as in Altman's Short Cuts) this is a gripping drama beginning with four friends who take a fishing trip, find something floating in the river, then return to their home town to be vilified by their friends and the local inhabitants. Directed by Lantana's Ray Lawrence and set deep inside a provincial backwater in the Australian outback, the slow burning opening soon escalates into an exquisitely acted, tension rich moral dilemma that traverses each character's life as the consequences spread like bush fire through the town. The hangdog charm of Gabriel Byrne takes centre stage as his marriage, and the semblance of probity in the town, is called into question by his browbeating wife (Laura Linney). The ending feels flat and dead but the build up is engrossing and this is the best Australian film for years (excluding The Proposition, of course).

NB: Jindabyne is released in London on 25/05. Also of note is a special advance screening at the BFI Southbank of Lunacy with a talk with its director Jan Svankmajer (29/05 at 6:30pm).

Coming off the back of the Free Noise tour, which included collaborations with free improvisers such as Evan Parker, Yellow Swans return to London on their own to break our ears with a wall of psychedelic noise. Yellow Swans are pretty much simply a duo of vocals and guitar, but processed, distorted and added to with droney, pulsating trance-like electronics -- although who knows whether some of the free jazz sensibilities of Mr Parker et al may have worn off on them or not. Also performing within the labyrinth of Corsica Studios is a vast line-up consisting of the throat singing "James Bond of Free Improvisation"; Arrington de Dionyso, the pure and innocent sounding Ignatz, Astral Social Club, Talibam! and Rameses III.

NB: for more noise make sure you catch KTL (Sunn O))) guitarist Stephen O'Malley and Pita) and Blood Stereo at the Luminaire on 29/05 (8pm). And, on 03/06 (8pm), catch Jack Rose, Ignatz and Silvester Anfang also at The Luminaire.

London promotion giants Go!Zilla celebrate their second anniversary this bank holiday in suitably grand fashion. Friday night sees them collaborate with My Beautiful City and Modular Records in doing the warehouse party thing. Soulwax bring their 2ManyDJs / Nite Versions show to town and are joined by new Modular signing Muscles and the much hyped Foals. Backing up the live music is an array of DJing talent with SebastiAn (the unsung genius of the Ed Banger stable), Herve (responsible, with Sinden, for the track of the summer in "Beeper"), JG Wilkes from Glasgow institution Optimo, Kitsune's DJ Kaos and Maurice Fulton -- a man of twisted genius that most recently manifested itself on Kathy Diamond's new album.

On Saturday the fun moves east to Cargo with the start of a monthly Go!Zilla residency, and they have invited riotous punk funk act out to play. Despite their second LP being given a somewhat muted public response, Spektrum's strength has always lied in their electric live performances and the arches at Cargo seem like the perfect setting for their sweat inducing set. Supporting Spektrum are Dan Berkson & James What from the Pokerflat family doing the live laptop set thing, and new Tirk signing George Demure & The Demurettes bringing the electro rockabilly sounds. Joining Go!Zilla resident James Priestley on the decks is ever evolving Riton, now signed to Berlin's Get Physical label and making club music much removed from his time on the now defunct Grand Central.

NB: this event is in two parts and takes place at Railway Arches on Friday night (68-74 Tooley St., SE1) and then at Cargo on Saturday night (83 Rivington St., EC2).

Art and politics, alter-modernism, artist-culture and capitalism are all issues previously tackled by influential East End gallery The Showroom during their annual conference series. This year's event, stirred up by the work of American artist Mike Kelley, is all about the status of the object within contemporary sculptural practice. Kelley's fusion of sculpture and performance neatly describes the post-'70s shift in art theory from object as a signifier of physical phenomenon to a systematised component or theatrical prop. Keynote speakers -- video and performance pioneer Joan Jonas, writer Andrea Phillips, Jan Verwoert (a contributing editor of frieze) -- and a panel of artists -- Showroom exhibitor Matti Braun, Saatchi-represented Pablo Bronstein and Scottish collaborators Joanne Tatham and Tom O'Sullivan -- will identify and discuss new forms emerging in contemporary art. With potential questions orbiting the theme such as what defines viewer perception of and engagement with the art-contextualised object, will one day be enough?

NB: Joan Jonas will be exhibiting at westlondonprojects from 25/05 till 28/07. On 24/05 (7pm), in conjunction with the private view (6:30 - 8:30pm) and the publication of the book Joan Jonas: I Want To Live In The Country (And Other Romances), the artist will be in conversation with Bettina Funcke of the Dia Art Foundation.

The Games For May concert, which took place at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on May 12th 1967, was one of the first significant concert events held by Pink Floyd. It was described as a "space age relaxation for the climax of spring -- electronic composition, colour and image projection, girls and the Pink Floyd". The concert featured some of the band's early singles as well as material from their then unreleased debut album -- The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn. It's a testament to the impact Pink Floyd went on to make that this night is being celebrated on the 40th anniversary of this legendary performance. Special guests include singer-songwriter and cult polymath Robyn Hitchcock, Graham Coxon (who is rumoured to have recently rejoined Blur) and Mercury Rev's guitarist Grasshopper. Floyd's drummer Nick Mason described Games For May as "one of the most significant shows we ever performed"; in the absence of the band itself it's unlikely this event will have such resonance. However, it should still be a great chance to re-live a famous event and pay tribute to one of the most important bands of the 20th century.

Thank god for Britain's devastated manufacturing industry. If our economy hadn't switched wholesale from the production of tangible items over to, well, whatever it is that we're supposed to trade in these days then we wouldn't have an abundance of warehouses to party in each weekend. Economic implications aside, the last year or two has seen a huge revival of warehouse parties as clubbers tire of shiny clubs and go in search of some ersatz rave authenticity. Leading the charge has been party promoters Issst, whose various warehouse parties have been vomiting out electro zombies onto the streets of Shoreditch for the past two years. To celebrate their second birthday they've roped in Parisian electro-goths Black Strobe, who, despite predating the whole Ed Banger crew by several years with some brilliant dark synth driven twelves on labels such as Output, are only finally releasing their debut album. Joining them is Jamie Reynolds of new rave pioneers Klaxons, who'll be taking care of business behind the decks, Parisian up-and-commer Shonky; resident Bobby M; and a whole host of other names that probably mean a lot to you if you regularly find yourself still out dancing at midday on a Sunday.

NB: for techno fans make sure you head to Fabric for Ricardo Villalobos, Alex Under (live) and The Black Dog (live).

Showing at the ICA as part of LFF Experimenta (25/05 till 07/06) is a Kenneth Anger 16mm shorts programme, a collection of work by the legendary independent filmmaking pioneer whom Scorsese described as "a unique filmmaker, an artist of exceptional talent" and who stormed the mainstream with his bestselling book Hollywood Babylon, which exposed the dark underbelly of Hollywood in all its drunken, drugged up beauty. The selection includes Fireworks (1947), Rabbit's Moon (1950), Kustom Kar Commandos (1965), Mouse Heaven (2005) and the hugely influential cult classic Scorpio Rising (1963) that manages to splice together homo erotic images of authentic '60s studded leather jacketed bikers with images of Jesus. Anger met the bikers in Coney Island, where they got together every Saturday to show off their bikes. They weren't Hells Angels but working class kids who loved their bikes. But what is the story about Jesus, you may enquire... When Anger was cutting the film, a package was delivered to him, which turned out to be a Sunday School film from a Lutheran Church that had a similar address. He watched the film and decided that he would keep it and run it in his film... "It was a magical happening."

NB: as a precursor to his films the ICA is showing Anger Me, a portrait of the man directed by Elio Gelmini, which takes the form of an extended monologue by Anger.

Gomma Records' latest crop, spearheaded by In Flagranti, WhoMadeWho and Headman, is brimming with unashamed Euro pride. Tones of Munich, Rome, even Geneva seep into their disco, electro and clash in a way that lends obvious comparisons with DFA Records -- which has built an empire by stitching threads of neglected indie and house and pouring New York all over it. As Murphy and co's current incarnation of the Brooklyn sound reaches saturation point, Gomma's wizards this side of the pond are embracing a Spartan avant dance that draws on Kraftwerk and Can where DFA might have echoed Talking Heads or ESG. On the eve of a Gomma compilation that looks set to tread the same sky as recent collections by label darlings Kitsune and Ed Banger, Munk and Rodion are leading the charge for Europe's imperial dance militia con brio. They could hardly hope for a more suitable wing commander to help keep the retro camp going than Kavinsky, the current mythmaker-in-chief among synth enthusiasts and a time traveller to boot. Everything points to a sharp and unrelenting tear through house sub-genres delivered with a sting.

Bank holidays tend to encourage us to make the most of our modest vacations -- it is always with a little satisfied smugness that we sleep in on Monday morning, confident that work will just have to wait another day. Throw in some aching muscles sore from dancing until your alarm goes off, and you've got the morning after Lost. The multifarious, deep and restless stylings of Detroit's minimal techno luminary (and Lost regular) Jeff Mills should be enough to coax you out to play, even after the most indulgent of weekend activities. Deep disco giant Francois K will play with Mills in the Red Room -- a match that's been a long time coming -- guaranteed to keep you out thrashing around on the dancefloor until the wee hours of Monday morning. These two DJs have been pleasing crowds on both sides of the pond for three decades, and between them they'll have your heads spinning with a complex fusion of signature mixing styles that should offset each other nicely. In the Purple Room, Spacebase standards Kim Bilir (aka Steve Bicknell), Juergen Junker and Toru will keep the pace and do their part to help you waste a Monday.

NB: for techno fans make sure you head to Fabric the night before for Ricardo Villalobos, Alex Under (live) and The Black Dog (live).

What happens when a RAF pilot jumps from his plane without a parachute through heavy English fog? He escapes from the angel meant to accompany him to heaven, falls in love and appeals his death, of course. At least, that's what Michael Powell and Emerich Pressburger had in mind when they made the film A Matter Of Life And Death in 1946. In Emma Rice's production for the National Theatre, heaven appears as an all singing, all dancing cabaret replete with smoking nurses on bicycles, incompetent Norwegian magicians and an on-stage band redolent of Emir Kusturica's gypsy orchestras. Strangely, the result is more cinematic than the film and it's also a departure from the NT's usual format. The metaphysical questions are still at the centre of the narrative: does love really conquer all? Is death a choice? Are we in control of our destiny? But they are sometimes overshadowed by the very physical performances, the high wire acts and Bill Mitchell's fantasist / fantastic set design. It sometimes feels more like a show by the Cirque Du Soleil than a play, but it certainly is very entertaining.

NB: runs till 20/06. On Fri 25/05 (6pm) catch Emma Rice as she discusses the production.

The BFI Southbank hosts this rare visit to London by -- and even rarer interview with -- the absolute master of surrealist animation, Prague's Jan Svankmajer. In films made strictly for grown-ups, never have food, clothes and everyday household items appeared more sinister and frightening than when they pass through the hands (and rather unfathomable mind) of Svankmajer, as he combines socks, toothbrushes, clay, toy trains, steak, false teeth, potatoes and twigs in bizarre and illogical combinations to create nightmarish stop-motion characters. A lifelong member of the Czech Surrealist Group, his work is both politically subversive and social commentary. Digging deep into the unconscious, his blackly-comic Freudian shorts and features have often explored the dark side of traditional fairytales (Little Otik) and children's stories (Alice), or turned to the Gothic works of Poe and de Sade -- the inspiration for his latest feature Lunacy (Sileni). Combining live action and animation, this exploration of fear and desire continues Svankmajer's tradition of fighting against forms of repression and of representing man's continuing difficulty in communicating with one another. As unsettling and dark as it is brilliant.

NB: Lunacy is released in London on 01/06. This advance screening and talk precedes the BFI's Jan Svankmajer Season, which runs from 01/06 till 21/06. Also of note this week is the release of Jindabyne.

Phyllida Barlow is the poor man's Martin Puryear. This is not a denigration of her craft, rather her slap-dash, gloopy paint surfaces are closer to the spirit of Jessica Stockholder and Cy Twombly, cut with a dash of Mary Heilmann's casual touch. With its drippy paint and constructed from scavenged building materials, the aesthetic of these sculptures is definitely one of a building site. Dotted all around this pristine corporate lobby, and despite their abstract qualities, these objects are full of allusions: banners, flags and weather vanes. There are free-standing towers, as well as paint strewn floor boards that lean against the highly-polished marble walls. The latter recall John McCracken's sublime "planks", though the Barlow exudes the earthy surface of a Clyfford Still. Not quite a cult figure but certainly, at age 63, a doyenne of British sculpture, Barlow's rough-hewn objects are both full of presence and humour -- a difficult combination indeed!

NB: runs till 01/06.

Taking its title from an abstract Picasso painting from 1918, The Artist's Dining Room brings together the work of three German artists working with abstraction. The exhibition fosters the excitement of exchanging ideas across the dinner table, showing the somewhat overlooked paintings and semi-sculptural work of Manfred Kuttner alongside pieces by contemporary Anselm Reyle and younger German painter Thomas Scheibitz. With the invention in the '60s of fluorescent paint, which stuck to almost anything, Kuttner began to paint his canvases and objects, such as a typewriter and piano belonging to the Dresden Art Academy, in geometric shapes and patterns. There is a curiously understated quality to Kuttner's brightly coloured optic works, when compared with the flashy collage of Reyle's large abstract canvases which incorporate mannered splashes of paint, stripes of glitter and scrunched up shiny foil. Taking Kuttner's quiet abstraction back to the figurative, Scheibitz makes paintings and sculptures that recall and simplify the shapes of the modern world: tower blocks and power sockets swirling around a central axis, or piling up into an uncertain structure. Rather than a common aesthetic, each artist exhibits a distinct feel for the man-made and the domestic that binds their various works together.

NB: runs till 04/06.

The gala premiere of Sketches Of Gehry brings to London a long-awaited piece of documentary film-making that follows one of the titans of modern design and architecture the world over. The 77-year-old Frank Gehry has never lost touch with his creative sense of self, its origins in a humble upbringing in Toronto and sustenance by artist friends in his long time home community of Santa Monica, California. Director Sydney Pollack, two-time Oscar award winner, portrays the master as an ordinary man who needs help in places high and low to pry his creative visions out of his imagination. The film does little to demystify the process of translating Gehry's famous squiggles from napkin to finished form, but for those interested in seeing the architect and his daily environment, there's enough to fill a rather sluggish 90 minutes. All the key patrons are here, from Thomas Krens, responsible for the epic-making Guggenheim Bilbao, to Barry Diller, who built Gehry's first building in Manhattan, which just opened. Like a long due political biopic, Sketches Of Gehry arrives at a time when the architect is reaching into his last years, and at the height of his powers is vying to make his biggest gambles.

Q&A
This special gala premiere kicks off London Architecture Week 2007 and will be preceded by a Q&A on stage with both Frank Gehry and Sydney Pollack. If you cannot make this screening you can catch both men in conversation with Jonathan Glancey at RIBA on 15/06 (7pm). Both these events will sell out so get your tickets fast!

NB: Sketches Of Gehry is released in London on 29/06. Also of note is the Architecture Foundation's Lacaton Vassal talk at Union Chapel on 29/05 (7pm).

Martin Creed has persistently undermined preconceptions of what art should be and this, the third and final Hauser & Wirth show at Coppermill, doesn't disappoint. Creed's playful installations and structural assaults have often alluded to the biomorphic possibilities of everyday objects and architecture. We now accept that a gallery wall might feature breast-like bumps and that the lights could go off, enshrining us temporarily in a naughty but rather uncomfortable darkness. But this time when an invigilator hits the lights we are left to bask in the coital glow projected from a giant screen on which two perfect, gargantuan human forms copulate, doggy fashion. The scale of this piece, and the fact that it has been slowed down to reduce each bodily jerk to a seductively controlled wobble, feels very Douglas Gordon. There are obvious professional nods of this kind every where you look: from the equally large, but interventionally impotent Richard Serra-like steel structure that is easily navigable, to a Steve Reich-inspired minimal piano performance. A couple examines the shadows seemingly cast by a row of evenly spaced nails hammered into the wall at gradually increasing depths. "Have they been painted?" asks the man. "No, I think they're real," replies the woman. How Creed.

NB: runs till 29/07.

The 31 bronze figures of Event Horizon that populate the skyline of the South Bank beckon you to make your way to The Hayward where you will find a superb exhibition by Antony Gormley. This show constitutes a perfect match for the often problematic brutalist architecture of the gallery, yet it retains Gormley's very strong aesthetic signature. The steel, cast iron and reinforced concrete of his works on the ground floor are set off in a most unsettling way by the title piece of the exhibition: a cloud contained in a glass room and lit by fluorescent light. Upon entering Blind Light, you can barely see your hands in front of you and are beset by a disconcerting loss of your sense of self in the surrounding space. Although this is without a doubt the main attraction, the surprises don't end there. An altogether different experience awaits those who dare enter Hatch, a three-dimensional homage to Mondrian made of floating steel rods emerging from all directions inside a small room. The smaller etchings and mixed media works on paper whisper next to the roaring scale of the installations and sculptures but they're just as worthy of a moment of contemplation.

NB: runs till 19/08.

Apparat's new solo album, Walls, demonstrates a slight departure from his previous work with Ellen Allien. On 2006's Orchestra Of Bubbles, Sascha Ring (as his mum calls him) crafted an album that melded together techno and house and created something close to pop music. Walls, on the other hand, delves into other genres of music, the squelchy digital funk of "Holdon" and droning ambience of "Limelight" for example, which could give the impression that there was a lack of focus that went into its inception. This is something that Ring does admit to a degree, referring to it as a compilation of the last two years of Apparat -- 14 tracks picked from over 70 ideas he has been working on whilst touring with Allien.

Despite this admission the album does flow as a whole, with some really outstanding moments along the way, the melancholic violin and keys on "Fractales Pt 1" and "Fractales Pt 2" and "You Don't Know Me" in particular. The only real gripe with Walls is Ring's decision to use his own vocals on two tracks. The press release compares his voice to Thom Yorke's, which is being somewhat creative with the truth. There's nothing immediately wrong with Ring's singing but it just seems a bit bland in comparison with Raz Ohara, who adds his voice to four tracks. Ohara's pained vocals sit perfectly well with the string led arrangements of tracks such as "Hailing From The Edge" and "Over And Over".

To buy Walls online click here.

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