The composer Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001) loved to gather masses of divergent sounds into musical clusters that he sometimes called galaxies. To honor this multitalented creative artist of Greek parentage who lived much of the time in Paris, the Electronic Music Foundation and the Italian choreographer LUCA VEGGETTI have assembled a galaxy of diverse talents for "XENAKIS AND JAPAN," a program celebrating this composer's love of Japanese culture. He especially admired Noh, the venerable theatrical form known for its ritualistic formality and gestural complexity. One of Mr. Veggetti's cast members is a Noh performer. But here the evening, while honoring the past, turns innovative, for RYOKO AOKI is one of the comparatively few women to be part of Noh's traditionally all-male theatrical milieu. Other dancers, trained in contemporary Western styles, include Frances Chiaverini and the Purchase Dance Corps from the Conservatory of Dance at Purchase College. Xenakis was an electronic music pioneer, and the evening's music will include both live and taped scores, including the appropriately titled "Orient-Occident." Sunday at 8 p.m., Judson Memorial Church, 55 Washington Square South, Greenwich Village, (888) 749-9998, events@emf.org; $15.
Adventures in the mythical past take center stage this week, uptown and downtown, as two venerable companies with radically different audiences and aesthetics, the Manhattan Theater Club and Mabou Mines, introduce new plays with intriguing concepts.
The uptown show, at City Center, is the New York premiere of Bill Cain's historical comedy-drama "EQUIVOCATION," originally staged at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, here directed by the Tony-winning Irish director Garry Hynes and starring Remy Auberjonois and Michael Countryman.
Mr. Cain's play imagines the ethical and dramaturgical problems that might have resulted from a playwriting commission by the court of King James. The recipient: William Shakespeare. The subject: the Gunpowder Plot, a failed attempt to assassinate the king in 1605. The king hopes to stoke anti-Catholic feeling, but as Shakespeare sets out to accommodate his ruler, he finds himself resisting the court's manipulation. Parallels to recent efforts by politicians to capitalize on terrorist acts for their own ends are very much intentional. Opens Tuesday, City Center Stage 1, 131 West 55th Street, Manhattan, (212) 581-1212, nycitycenter.org; $75.
At the Skirball Center for the Performing Arts in Greenwich Village, Mabou Mines celebrates its 40 years in experimental theater with a multimedia work that blends classic narrative with digital technology. "FINN" resurrects the Celtic leader Finn McCool, sort of a Harry Potter of the ancient world. Conceived and directed by the company's co-artistic director, Sharon Fogarty, and written by Jocelyn Clarke, the play follows the young Finn as he learns to use powers both mortal and magical to lead his clan to victory in battle and avenge the death of his father. Opens Thursday, 566 La Guardia Place, at Washington Square South, (212) 352-3101, maboumines.org; $30-$55.
Pedro González-Rubio's "ALAMAR" depicts the oceanic idyll of Jorge, a Mexican fisherman and his 5-year-old son, Natan, whom Jorge takes to a coral reef where he teaches him the ways of the sea, before the boy goes to live with his mother, Roberta, in Italy. The movie opens the "Rotterdam@BAM" program from the International Film Festival Rotterdam at BAMcinématek on Wednesday.
Because the characters' names are identical to those of the actors, "Alamar" occupies the shadowy area between documentary and feature film. In the opening scene, set in Italy, Natan's parents, who remain friends, in separate voice-overs tell of their three-and-a-half-year relationship, which ended when Roberta could no longer continue leading her husband's minimal way of life. In a farewell gesture Jorge takes his son by boat to his workplace, a rudimentary fisherman's hut on the Chinchorro reef in the Mexican Caribbean. There he and an older worker catch lobster and barracuda, cook fish soup and teach Natan to fish and to snorkel. The underwater photography of Jorge wielding his spear is eerily transporting. But, most touchingly, the movie captures a primal father-son bond as Jorge, who suggests a hippie Tarzan, passes his knowledge and skills on to the next generation.
The series, a groundbreaking collaboration between a respected European film festival and an American institution, includes 14 features and shorts. Wednesday through March 9, the BAM Rose Cinemas, 30 Lafayette Avenue, Fort Greene, Brooklyn, (718) 636-4100, bam.org; $12.
"SOUTHLAND," which would look awfully good on NBC's schedule right now, finally gets to have its second season beginning this week on TNT (10 p.m. Tuesday). This dark ensemble drama about Los Angeles police officers was renewed by NBC after a short but well-reviewed run last spring, then canceled in October before a single new episode had been shown, a victim of its traditional budget (real actors!) and the super-sizing of Jay Leno's 10 p.m. show. That decision didn't seem so prudent when Mr. Leno headed back to late night and NBC had to scramble to fill five hours of prime time.
The six new episodes of "Southland" (TNT has not announced a decision about renewing the show) will now compete at 10 p.m. with one of NBC's plug-the-dike shows, the family dramedy "Parenthood," offering viewers a clear-cut choice. (Of course most of them will probably continue to choose "The Good Wife" on CBS.) "Southland" returns with an episode that will reveal the fate of Detective Russell Clarke (Tom Everett Scott), shot by an angry neighbor in the Season 1 cliffhanger. Amaury Nolasco, last seen as Sucre in "Prison Break," joins the cast as a new detective, and the playwright and television writer Diana Son ("Law & Order: Criminal Intent") is on board as a consulting producer.
By now JAY-Z probably has a catering station named for him at Madison Square Garden, a room he's played numerous times. On Tuesday he's back, still on an impressively long run following "The Blueprint 3" (Roc Nation), an album, released last year, that's proven his persistent pop impact and continued versatility. (The bill also includes the wheezy, ever-improving Atlanta rapper Young Jeezy and the bawdy R&B comer Trey Songz.) Jay-Z is the only rapper, Kanye West excepted, who implicitly trusts that his songs are arena-worthy. Which means that his show, while expert, is relatively tame. It's a cocksure strategy that can only be pulled off by someone who knows that even his smallest moments can fill the vastness.
MUSE, shall we say, has a different approach. On Friday this British prog-rock band is playing its second show at the Garden. (Silversun Pickups will open.) The first time was three years ago, on the heels of its best album, "Black Holes and Revelations" (Warner Brothers). Last year it released "The Resistance," the follow-up, which was less lyrically goofy but just as flamboyant, so it's likely that Muse's stage gimmickry will be undimmed. Sure, this group is far less famous on these shores than Jay-Z, but it certainly won't look that way. Both shows at 8 p.m., (800) 745-3000, ticketmaster.com.
Besides bringing technical skill and artistic vision to bear, certain conductors have an indefinable chemistry with a particular orchestra. The Finnish conductor OSMO VANSKA has been exceptionally successful since becoming music director of the MINNESOTA ORCHESTRA in 2003. Mr. Vanska and the Minnesota Orchestra come to Carnegie Hall on Monday for a much-anticipated concert that begins with Beethoven's gnarly Grosse Fuge, a late work for string quartet played here in an arrangement by Michael Steinberg. The main offering is Sibelius's "Kullervo," an audacious, seldom-heard, epic-size work for vocal soloists, chorus and orchestra inspired by Finnish folklore. Monday at 8 p.m., (212) 247-7800, carnegiehall.org; $32 to $96.
This year is the 400th anniversary of Monteverdi's "Vespers of 1610." This 90-minute score for soloists, chorus and orchestra is considered the most ambitious sacred work written before Bach. The acclaimed period-instrument orchestra BOSTON BAROQUE will perform it on Saturday at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, conducted by Martin Pearlman, who founded the ensemble in 1973. This is the first performance by Boston Baroque in New York in 25 years. Boston Baroque made a superb 1997 recording of the "Vespers of 1610" on the Telarc label. Saturday at 8 p.m., Amsterdam Avenue at 112th Street, Morningside Heights, (866) 811-4111, bostonbaroque.org; $20 to $55.
Realism: It seems like a fairly straightforward idea, but philosophers will tell you it is not so simple. Sometimes it means that only what can be perceived by our five senses is really real. Other times it asserts that certain metaphysical or transcendental entities — Plato's archetypes, for example — are the fundamental realities. The beauty of art is you can have it both ways.
"THE SACRED MADE REAL: SPANISH PAINTING AND SCULPTURE, 1600-1700," a tightly focused exhibition at the NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART, presents works of painting and sculpture by old masters like Diego Velázquez and Francisco de Zurbarán in which Jesus, Mary Magdalene and other luminaries of Christianity are represented with nearly superrealistic vividness. The show pairs each of 11 paintings with a thematically related, startlingly lifelike sculpture. Three-dimensional figures by Pedro de Mena and Gregorio Fernández, among others, were not only realistically painted; they also could have glass eyes and tears, ivory teeth, and toenails made from animal horn.
Such magical illusionism served to inspire and affirm religious belief. For today's devotees of art such intersections of sensual immediacy and spiritual poetry still can stir powerful feelings of awe and wonder if not unquestioning faith. Through May 31, on the National Mall between Third and Ninth Streets, at Constitution Avenue NW, Washington, (202) 737-4215, nga.gov.