Hekani is a word from the Ndau language in Zimbabwe. As a chant of welcome and celebration, it�s an appropriately multi-faceted opener to New Works New Worlds, the latest festival of leftfield performance and random underground happenings at The Arches.

Hekani is a word from the Ndau language in Zimbabwe. As a chant of welcome and celebration, it's an appropriately multi-faceted opener to New Works New Worlds, the latest festival of leftfield performance and random underground happenings at The Arches. As performed by Seeds of Thought, the African performance poetry duo of brothers Tawona and Ernest Sithole in The Arches' middle bar, their half-hour set, Moyo Chirandu: Ancient Echoes, quietly but determinedly sets the tone of things to come.

This is done through a series of slow-burning verses which attempt to tap into the first-hand experience of the brothers' ancestors set to a bubbling score played out on a pair of mbira, a percussion instrument once claimed by colonial masters to be producing the devil's music. In the hands of the Sithole brothers, however, they not only accentuate their verbal rhythms. There's a sense too of reclaiming roots that's awash with quiet fire.

Also in the middle bar and running until the end of the week is Miasma (1973), a video installation by Lindsay Perth which attempts to tap into current concerns about global warming by re-editing two examples from the wave of disaster movies which proliferated in the early 1970s. Twin screens face each other, playing versions of The Towering Inferno and The Poseidon Adventure, in which, in a pre-9/11 world, people dance, drown and burn in endless synch, wiped out by the elemental and near-biblical plagues of fire and water. Beyond the two films' period kitsch, in a world where apocalypse is predicted every day - at times with good reason - their melodramatic, at times fetishistic renderings become all-engulfing microcosms of worst possible scenarios.

Also tackling 21st-century concerns is Kieran Hurley, whose Hitch (A Prelude) takes up the whole of the next room with an installation that seems to lie in state as its creator makes it real. Hurley is currently travelling to L'Aquila in Italy, where the latest G8 summit is set to take place next week. What Hurley does when he gets there, travelling slowly and cheaply towards his goal, remains to be seen, but it will mostly likely form the basis of a forthcoming performance that this installation prefaces. With a map on one wall and a video diptych of Hurley packing and hitching a ride south opposite, in between are a carefully placed display of mini lecterns. On these are placed various dispatches home, a note to Hurley's mother, snapshots of previous protests, a poem by Primo Levi and other mementos of an activist's road trip. The extent to which they predict Hurley's ongoing excursion should prove fascinating.

The repoliticisation of the arts and theatre in particular may have happened a good while before the recession, though the responses have been refreshingly non-linear, as both Richard DeDomenici and Naomi Shoba's contributions to New Works New Worlds make clear in radically different ways.

DeDomenici's Plane Food Café invites its audience into a themed fast food outlet with the interior of a real aeroplane as its backdrop. The starting point for this is how flying in pressurised aircraft numbs the taste buds enough to tolerate the already tasteless in-flight cuisine without question. On the ground, he argues, things taste different. Following an educational slide-show which introduces strapped-in passengers to an array of flight-related and environmental ills designed to challenge even the staunchest of appetites, DeDomenici serves up hot plates of genuine airline food, for thought as much as gastronomic delight. In this absurdist provocation, he also manages to bring Marcel Duchamp into his discourse, and introduces us to the word snarfing. Look it up.

It's interesting to note that, while DeDomenici soundtracks his piece with excerpts from West Side Story, The Sustainability of Sweetness co-opts a reading of Over the Rainbow. While it's tantalising to consider the possibility of both in a performance artists' chorus line, Shoba's full-on assault on the beauty myth and race and gender stereotyping immediately dispels such fripperies. With the house-lights up on the audience, she unleashes a collage of chocolate, high heels and other girly pleasures to tackle everything from ethnic glamour to hip-hop misogyny, taking in Cheryl Cole, Malcolm X and Michael Jackson en route. As she feminises macho beats with a refrain of "I can have whatever I like," Shoba's refusal to kowtow to the status quo is fearless.