Hofesh Shechter's Political Mother, Sadler's Wells

An assault on ears, eyes and nerves by a stunning piece of dance-theatre

In the middle of the pulverisingly loud and utterly thrilling experience that is Hofesh Shechter’s new production Political Mother, I wished suddenly that all dancers could come and see this piece, see what clarion theatre dance can be. If the theatrical thread often thins almost to vanishing point in some of the more mediocre ballet productions that turn up, this work is a positive rope of theatricality, thick, hard, massive, a slab of incredibly loud music and incredibly fierce, reflective emotion.

The Art of Touch/ Rainforest/ A Linha Curva, Rambert, Sadler's Wells

Two rich dishes of past contemporary masters plus a fast food sugar-rush

There are occasionally pieces of dance that you just want not to have to scribble notes about, just to watch and enjoy through your senses, not perming it all through the verbal brain. Siobhan Davies’s The Art of Touch is one of those, and when her company went into something of a creative abeyance to focus on producing a new dance community centre, this was one of Davies’s many gems of dance poetry that I feared we might never be able to bask in again.

I Am a Warehouse, Newhaven Fort, Brighton Festival Fringe

Drama about the destruction of a Gaza warehouse in an evocative setting

Just say "Gaza" and it's like throwing a bombshell marked "Darwin" in among the Creationists. Only in this case it's not always clear who the antagonists might be. Several seemingly liberal theatre venues in Israel, where this project originated as a clear statement of the UN Relief and Works Agency's humanitarian role, cancelled at the last minute; more recently, supposedly enlightened sponsors suddenly withdrew substantial support. None had seen or read the content. It seems that telling the plain tale of a warehouse destroyed is inflammatory stuff. Odd when the warehouse in question, the protagonist of this drama, goes out of its way to tell us that it takes no sides and holds no weapons.

the Artes Mundi Award goes to...

Great excitement at the Artes Mundi Awards in Cardiff’s National Museum last night as the UK’s largest cash prize for the winner of any UK contemporary art competition - a staggering £40,000 - was presented to the Israeli artist Yael Bartana. Two hours before the announcement, the judges were still undecided but the white smoke moment saw Bartana’s two films (part of an ongoing trilogy) land the cheque.

Iram: Shalom Aleichem's shtetl life comes to London

Pre-conflict, pre-Holocaust Jewish life movingly resurrected by Israel's Herzliya Ensemble

Tonight at the Barbican's Pit, kicking off a run of ten performances, a rather unusual piece of theatre opens. It's not a big play, it probably won't make great waves and it does involve reading surtitles. Called Iram, it's an Israeli adaptation, in Hebrew, of the stories of the Yiddish writer Shalom Aleichem. Outside Israel - excluding, at a pinch, bookish circles in transatlantic Jewish communities (Aleichem emigrated from the Ukraine to the US before the First World War) - this prolific chronicler of late 19th-century shtetl life will grace few home libraries.

Lebanon

Tank's-eye-view of the horrors of war

A field of sunflowers hang their heads, as though in shame or sorrow, to the deep thrum of a single chord in the film's opening shot, at once beautiful and threatening. But that is about the only breath of fresh air in the whole of the movie. Set on the first day of the 1982 Lebanon War, it proceeds for the rest of its duration to trap us, along with four terrified young Israeli soldiers, inside the confines of their tank, a monstrous apparition fetid with stale cigarette smoke, sweat and blood and a fifth character in its own right.

Gilad Atzmon’s Orient House Ensemble, Vortex

Charismatic Israeli saxophonist combines political jokes and fine orientalist jazz

The force of Israeli-born Gilad Atzmon’s world view – his anti-Zionism, but also what Robert Wyatt, a self-confessed “Gilad groupie”, calls the “intrinsically non-racialist philosophy that's implicit in jazz” – comes through loud and clear in his stage banter. Not many jazzers namecheck the Chilcot Inquiry or dedicate tunes to “the biggest arseholes on the planet”: ie a good handful of (named) British and Israeli politicians.

Photographic Gallery: Niall O'Brien, Art Work Space

Good Rats: the faces of modern punk go on show

Purists would have it that punk rock was but a brief explosion in first New York then London, and was all but spent by the end of 1977. Irish photographer Niall O'Brien, however, was born in 1979 and has no truck with purism. Instead, taking the role of anthropologist for his exhibition Good Rats, he has befriended and spent time with groups of young punks, from skaters in Kingston-upon-Thames to homeless teens in Berlin and Tel Aviv, and documented the noise, chaos and sense of belonging that comes with the subculture more than three decades on from its inception. Click on the images below to view his work.
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