You could never argue that success has spoiled Pere Ubu. Twenty-five years after they emerged from the industrial desert of Ohio, Ubu continue to plough a perverse and eccentric furrow, with commendable enthusiasm. "There are so few of you, yet your appreciation is so precious to us," deadpanned David Thomas, still tethered to the helm half a lifetime later.

It's Thomas who supplies Ubu's ballast, in every respect. The freakish pitch changes of his voice give warning that no song is safe when he comes near it, while his cryptic introductions have become part of the performance. Scornful of dietary fads, Thomas is still a massively bulky presence at the microphone, a perverse mixture of Orson Welles and John Goodman.

Despite creating an illusion of cacophonousness, Ubu play what is basically rock with attitude, with a light dusting of chaos to remind us of their surrealist origins. Thomas spent the first few minutes striking dramatic postures while blowing down what looked like the kind of horn cyclists attach to their handlebars. Then he adorned himself with a red plastic apron covered with electronic gadgetry, enabling him to conjure weird sonic effects from the amplifiers. Even weirder, in fact, than those already coming from the theremin on the opposite side of the stage.

Ubu aren't exactly armed to the teeth with "hits", but their version of Final Solution was like an explosion in a scrapyard and quite epic in its way. They kept resisting shouts for Non-Alignment Pact but relented at the end, as fans stormed the stage and even ventured a spot of mild pogoing.

Ubu were joined for the encore by MC5 veteran Wayne Kramer, whose set earlier in the evening showed he hasn't abandoned hope that rock music has some value as a polemical medium with a political message. As his trio crunched out punkish riffs, Kramer rasped lyrics about sexual exploitation, drugs and bomb-making terrorists, punctuating his bulletins with screaming lead guitar. It was a salutary reminder of a time when people really did believe rock'n'roll could change the world.

Dance

Ariadone

Linbury Studio, Covent Garden ***

Ever since Nijinsky premiered his notorious Sacre du Printemps in 1913, the ballet has become a rite of passage for other choreographers. Artists as varied as Béjart, Pina Bausch and Michael Clark have all felt moved to recreate the work in their own image. How they handle it becomes a defining statement of their style. So it's no surprise that Carlotta Ikeda and her company Ariadone should produce a Rite which bears all the hallmarks of the Japanese expressionist form butoh: its seven female dancers masked from head to toe in white make-up, their bodies scrunched earnestly into slow moving postures of extreme visceral emotion.

What is surprising is that this sisterhood of keening, witchy dancers should also look back to 19th century ballet for their inspiration. The work certainly starts in classic butoh mode as the dancers appear wracked by the forces unleashed in Stravinsky's score. With their bodies curled into foetal self-protection and their faces frozen into howling screams, they seem maddened by the intensity of the primal, physical world. At other moments they seem to become nature itself as Ikeda gathers them into churning groups of movement, then lets them disperse into finely drawn tendrils of dance, suggesting flecks of foam on the water or rogue sea breezes. It's a vision of ancient terror and power, a very female vision of death and birth.

But then Ikeda seems to be calling up ghosts of older dancers to elaborate her vision, using fragments of Stravinsky's original Rite mixed with sounds of wind and sea, industrial machinery and distant wisps of song. A trio of women in ratty tutus, limbs contorted with savagely subversive humour, become mad little cygnets from Swan Lake. There are doll like Coppelias whose marionette cuteness is underscored with erotic mischief. Best are the Wilis (the ghosts of jilted women from Giselle) who cross the stage with a haunting off-kilter craziness.

The work also neatly turns around the final sacrificial solo in Rite - with Ikeda herself performing a dance of survival, and apparently containing the world's forces within her own inscrutably slow movement. It's a fine image, as fine as many which appear in the work. But its power is diluted by Ikeda's overall failure to pace and build her material. Butoh is always slow, but at best it sustains an intentness, a focus which staves off our restlessness. Ikeda's Haru No Saiten slips in and out of focus too readily within its 80-minute duration. It induces moments of wonderment but whole sections, unfortunately, of boredom too.

Theatre

Rumble Fish

Theatre Royal, York ***

The world premiere of the adaptation of SE Hinton's cult novel is something of a coup for Pilot Theatre Company. If it turns out to be less satisfactory than the company's last production, Lord of the Flies, it is not for want of theatrical daring - more to do with the fact that, for all its pseudo- Greek grandeur, Hinton's tale of brotherly love and hate in smalltown USA is big on teenage angst but small on more pressing world issues.

Adaptor and director Marcus Romer attempts some updating and there is a passing nod towards the connection between alienation, loneliness and the Columbine High School massacre. But there is little in the script that isn't conveyed more eloquently by his production, in which digital projection and live action are combined to quite brilliant and dislocating effect.

The overall impression is of something extraordinarily liquid, as if the entire performance is taking place in a giant goldfish bowl. A goldfish bowl which - as teenage tearaway Rusty James becomes increasingly obsessed with his brother, Motorcycle Boy - appears to fill with swirling patterns of blood. The sense of tension is added to by a continuous soundtrack that becomes a comment upon Rusty's increasingly agitated emotional internal world.

As in Francis Ford Coppola's movie version, the setting is almost timeless, maybe even futuristic, an impression added to by Ali Allen and Marise Rose's set, an urban concrete canyon complete with climbing wall. The actors use every inch of the space, both vertical and horizontal.

The increasing isolation of Rusty is cleverly done. This is a soul cut adrift: abandoned as a child by his mother, ignored by his drunken father, dumped by his girlfriend and rejected by his best friend. Romer's production places him in creasingly apart, bound only by an invisible umbilical cord to the brother who tolerates him but cannot embrace him.

Playing Rusty, Ari James is impressive on the boy's broken physicality, but vocally monotonous - particularly when conveying internal thought. These might work better as voiceovers. Most of the other characterisations are too skimpy to really make you care, although Ryan McClusky as Motorcycle Boy has a self-contained, detached glamour.

But for all its flaws, as with Lord of the Flies, there is a genuine sense of theatrical enquiry as it explores the relationship between theatre and digital technology, and triumphantly proves that they can be equal partners. And you can't complain about a show that gets 800 teenagers into the theatre on a wet Wednesday afternoon and generates the kind of rapt attention in which you could hear a pin drop.

Until October 7. Box office: 01904 623568. Then tours.