The single spacious room that is the central location of Tena Štivičić’s 3 Winters has seen plenty of ghosts. It’s part of an old Zagreb mansion, and through the course of the play witnesses the diverse events of Croatian history of the last 70-odd years played out in miniature. Three overlapping time-schemes chart the full rotations of surrounding society: from the war-end move towards Communism in 1945, through 1990 eve-of-break-up Yugoslavia, and on to 2011, not long before EU accession.

This huge exhibition is an awesome and terrifying compilation of photographs of the sites of conflict, and the remnants of wars and conflicts of all kinds – local, civil, short, long, global, technological, industrial and hand-to-hand. Taken from the mid 19^th century to the present, the images – hundreds, perhaps even well over a thousand –  are oblique and often incomprehensible or unidentifiable without the expansive wall captions. This is a show requiring us to read as well as look. 

In an operatic world in which the director is an increasingly despotic king, it’s good to be reminded that, sometimes, not staging an opera is the most radical reading of all. No elaborate set or concept dominated David Edwards’s one-off Pelléas et Mélisande at the Royal Festival Hall last night. There were just suggestions, allusions, echoes. And a cast – what a cast – that came close to perfection.

In Concerning Violence Göran Hugo Olsson has created an almanac documentary drawing on material from Swedish television archives, filmed by a number of directors in Africa, largely in the 1970s. It’s fascinating footage, covering a number of perspectives on what was happening in the continent over that decade, from the frontline guerilla wars with the MPLA in Angola and FRELIMO in Mozambique, to industrial unrest in Liberia, and apparently matter-of-fact interviews with white settlers in Rhodesia and elsewhere.

Anselm Kiefer reminds me a bit of someone I once worked for. Totally unpredictable, and possessed of a formidable intelligence and creativity, his mental leaps can be bewilderingly hard to follow, leading occasionally to truly breathtaking results, but crashing and burning just as often. Everyone else, like me, or in Kiefer’s case his long-suffering assistant Tony, not to mention poor old Alan Yentob, has to trot along behind, barely able to keep up with the barrage of ideas, questions and orders, let alone judge whether any of it is any good.

Walking into this exhibition is a bit like walking into a great forest. The dark green walls are hung all around with paintings of trees; we look up through branches that spiral dizzyingly skyward, while the upwards sweep of vast trunks seem relentlessly, tangibly full of life. Some of these paintings verge on abstraction, the forms of tree trunks simplified and reduced to an arrangement of planes, with spatial recession represented entirely through colour.

This morning, those who follow ballet on both sides of the Atlantic might be feeling a bit like the male soloists at the beginning of Ashton’s Scènes de Ballet: turning their heads sharply, almost pantomimically, from side to side. Over there, in New York, Wendy Whelan, the prima ballerina retiring after a 30-year career with City Ballet, made her farewell in a programme heavy on modern masters Wheeldon and Ratmansky, including a world première.

^{New Adventures, the name of Matthew Bourne's company, has a ruddy-cheeked, Boys’ Own ring to it that has – until now – been rather belied by his oeuvre, which includes a dance version of Edward Scissorhands, as well as dark retellings of all the traditional story ballets. But the New Adventure which rolled into Sadler’s Wells last night really is an adventure – an adaptation of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, the desert island schoolboy story heavy with allegory about the propensity of human beings to descend into barbarism.}

As a political act, the first performance of Angelina Weld Grimké’s Rachel in 1916 is exceptionally important. It was staged in Washington DC by the drama committee of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and was the first play by an African-American woman ever to be professionally produced (as well as one of the first to feature an all-black cast).

Comparisons, even on paper, between two season openers from London orchestras could hardly have been more instructive. I didn’t attend Valery Gergiev’s London Symphony Orchestra concert last week, for reasons several times outlined on theartsdesk. But quite apart from the fact that Gergiev and his court pianist Denis Matsuev are active supporters of Putin's “Might is Right” campaign in the Ukraine – a situation which tens of thousands of Muscovites are beginning to challenge – Matsuev is also the worst of barnstormers.