MUSIC
Meltdown festival
(Southbank Centre, London, Monday to 30 August)
Rather than just “art-punk”, David Byrne has spent his post-Talking Heads career being “art-” just about everything. An inquisitive musician, Byrne was one of those people who was globalised before the internet, in 1981 releasing the world/ambient album My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts with Brian Eno, and founding the world music label Luaka Bop. His curation of Meltdown features impressive flamenco, and a screening of There Will Be Blood with Jonny Greenwood’s live score, while the music of William Onyeabor is celebrated in the Atomic Bomb! show, a performance in which Byrne himself appears. John Robinson
The rest of this week’s live music
FILM
Mistress America
Would-be Manhattan socialite Brooke (Greta Gerwig) is 30 and almost over-the-hill: none of her dreams have panned out, and now she is frantically trying to raise funds to open a restaurant. Into her life walks her stepsister-to-be, Tracy (Lola Kirke), who needs a friend and mentor. What starts as a breezy, French New Wave-influenced comedy in the style of Baumbach and Gerwig’s Frances Ha soon spirals off into screwball delirium in a second half that has all the creaky mechanics of a Broadway farce. Not all of it gels, but Gerwig is spectacular. Ryan Gilbey
The rest of this week’s new films
COMEDY
James Acaster: Represent
(Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, to 30 August)
The overwhelming majority of comedians at the fringe would give anything to get nominated for the supposedly all-important Edinburgh comedy award. James Acaster, though, would probably greet a shortlisting with a certain amount of suspicion – he’s been nominated each of the past three years without winning, and must surely be wondering if he’ll ever get the recognition his considerable talent deserves. Key to his appeal is the way he straddles the divide between the alternative and the mainstream. Despite coming across as a geeky figure – the sort of guy who you imagine spent more time at school writing poetry than playing football – he’s not an alienating performer, and focuses on delivering laughter for all rather than creating a show that’s self-consciously arty. His stock-in-trade is a kind of quirky, elevated observational humour, forging unlikely connections and offering strangely appealing theories about how the world really works. James Kettle
The rest of this week’s comedy
THEATRE
Our Ladies Of Perpetual Succour
(Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, Tuesday to 30 August)
A new play by Lee Hall, who wrote Billy Elliot and The Pitmen Painters, is something to celebrate and this adaptation of Alan Warner’s novel The Sopranos, co-commissioned by National Theatre of Scotland and Newcastle’s Live Theatre, should be a treat. Vicky Featherstone directs the tale of a Catholic school choir trip, which focuses on the lives of a group of teenage girls who are supposed to be concentrating on singing but are more interested in sex and sambuca. Hall describes the show as “filthy, manic, hilarious and heartbreaking in equal measure” and with a soundtrack of classical music and 1970s rock and pop this should be a real crowd-pleaser. Lyn Gardner
The rest of this week’s theatre
FILM EVENT
Cyclescreen: Bristol bike film festival
(Watershed, Bristol, Thursday to 23 August)
Cycling in cinema will be in the spotlight later this year with the release of Stephen Frears’s The Program, starring Ben Foster as Lance Armstrong. Get ahead of the curve by swotting up on a brief history of two-wheeled cinema at Cyclescreen, Bristol’s dedicated cycling film festival, where a lineup of documentaries and talks demonstrates how cycling and cinema intersect. Inevitably one race looms large: Slaying The Badger examines the rivalry between Greg LeMond and Bernard “The Badger” Hinault during the 1986 Tour de France, while La Course En Tête is a profile of racing champion Eddy Merckx, who won that race five times. But this is not simply a testosterone-fest. Two films about women – Who Is Dervla Murphy? (answer: the first lady of Irish cycling) and Come On Eileen, about record-breaking Coventry cyclist Eileen Sheridan – screen together as a double bill on Thursday. RG
The rest of this week’s film events
TV
The Americans
(Wednesday, 10pm, ITV Encore)
The excellent drama about Soviet agents embedded in 1980s America returns for season three. The Afghanistan war – “Russia’s Vietnam” – is hotting up and pressure is growing on Elizabeth and Philip to groom their daughter for the cause, leading to tensions between the couple. As ever, sex plays a big part in their espionage, with Philip enjoying some kama sutra action with Martha for the sake of world communism, while Elizabeth must endure a brutal dust-up with two FBI agents. David Stubbs
CLUBS
Vent presents
(Dance Tunnel, London, Saturday)
Aaron Siegel spreads the gospel of Detroit more evangelistically than most. With his FIT label and distribution outfit, he’s helped lob records from Carl Craig, Theo Parrish and Omar S’s labels into racks across the world, while his cockle-warming house tracks are rich with the city’s DIY spirit. Take Enter The Fog, where jazzy organs get beckoned into a smoke-filled sweatbox, or Tonite, whose piano
riff sounds as if it’s played on a mildewed street piano but still slays. He’s joined here by Willie Burns, proprietor of NYC’s The Thing, less a record shop and more a cratedigger’s dreamscape. Burns, too, is a man of hyphenate talents, heading up the great WT Records label and putting out his own tracks under a bunch of aliases. An unmissable subterranean voyage. Ben Beaumont-Thomas
EXHIBITIONS
Lucky Dragons
(Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea, to 29 August)
In one of the art world’s more incongruous pairings, linchpins of Los Angeles’s avant-garde music scene, art band Lucky Dragons, are staging their psychedelic, electronic experiments between the US west coast and Southend-on-Sea this summer. One half of the duo, Luke Fischbeck, has gone to work in a specially created studio-cum-project space, The Bear Pit, within the seaside town’s ground-breaking gallery Focal Point. Here, overseen by audiences from the viewing gallery, he’s working up feedback loops of images and sound sent by his bandmate Sarah Rara. Lucky Dragons aren’t the kind of laptop noiseniks who stand aloof on a stage. Their live shows have seen music improvised via the audience, hooked up with wires or playing percussive technology. You can expect both their gallery time and a special mid-residency performance next Saturday to rewrite the usual performer/spectator divide and go big on audience collaboration. Skye Sherwin
The rest of this week’s exhibitions
TALKS
Jesse Jackson
(The British Library, London, Friday)
Since his early days working alongside Martin Luther King, civil rights giant the Rev Jesse Jackson has dedicated his life to campaigning for equality. A two-time presidential candidate, next to Obama he’s arguably America’s most significant black political figure, and one of the most intriguing characters to enter that stage. Although his organisation Rainbow/PUSH fights on issues including universal healthcare, decent housing and a living wage, for some he’s a hothead given to overblown pronouncements and a disquieting ability to exploit the cameras during a crisis (or vice versa). Be that as it may, he’s a famously magnetic figure, whose performance, whether on the public stage or in the pulpit, is an experience not to be missed. For this talk, with BBC World News Today’s Philippa Thomas, he’ll focus on equality in America and the world. With the recent Charleston shootings, his message could scarcely be more pressing. SS
DANCE
Seven
(Edinburgh Playhouse, Thursday to 22 August)
Under the direction of Martin Schläpfer, German company Ballett Am Rhein has been galvanised to a new level of creativity in both its repertory and performances. In this new ballet, Schläpfer has taken on the epic challenge of Mahler’s Seventh Symphony, creating a work that shows off the dancers’ virtuosity while choreographing a state of very modern ambivalence and uncertainty. Ranging from a limpid classicism to darkly expressionist movement, the ballet runs the gamut of emotions in Mahler’s score, played by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra. Judith Mackrell
