June 24 - 30 - NYTimes.com AN early oratorio version of Paola Prestini's multimedia opera, "OCEANIC VERSES," was performed at New York City Opera's Vox readings in 2011, and it left a mixed impression. But since then Ms. Prestini - an inventive composer whose style mixes the ancient and the up-to-date, the folk inspired and the artfully polished - has revamped the work, expanding it into a full opera, with a libretto by Donna Di Novelli and film by Ali Hossaini. The nonlinear story follows four characters - the Sailor, the Soldier, the Scholar and the Peasant - whose individual quests are linked by a search for a common past in the disappearing traditions of southern Italy. The characters have alter egos of sorts, film versions meant to represent their inner selves. The expanded work is having its New York premiere as part of the River to River Festival. The production is directed by Kevin Newbury, and Claudio Prima, Christopher Burchett, Helga Davis and Nancy Allen Lundy sing the principal roles, with Julian Wachner conducting Novus NY (the contemporary music ensemble of Trinity Wall Street), the Washington Chorus and the Brooklyn Youth Chorus. 7:30 p.m. Monday, Michael Schimmel Center for the Arts, 3 Spruce Street, Lower Manhattan, (212) 219-9401, rivertorivernyc.com; free. MAN FOREVER, led by the drummer Kid Millions (real name John Colpitts), is not a band so much as a strategy, or a set of compositions. Some of it involves multiple drummers playing meticulously tuned drums. Some of it involves two drummers facing each other around one drum and playing single-stroke rolls for long periods. (It's Kid Millions and whoever else, depending on what city he's in. On Friday, at Issue Project Room, he will be joined by the drummers Greg Fox, from Guardian Alien; Josh Bonati, from Aa; Ryan Sawyer, from Stars Like Fleas; and Bryan Devendorf from the National.) Around that drumming, bass and guitar and organ play a restricted number of chord choices, and electric sound assumes its own shapes, with rumbles and phase effects and vibrating microrhythms. It's meditative but also pretty overwhelming, and having played with the collective band Oneida for years, Mr. Colpitts knows how repetition can become a transformative, almost physical force. 8 p.m. (part of the performance space's Darmstadt 2012 festival), 22 Boerum Place, Downtown Brooklyn, (718) 330-1313, issueprojectroom.org; $15. IF among the usual subheadings like "History" and "Notable People" your town's Wikipedia entry also includes a section titled "U.F.O. Sightings," reality-television cameras will almost certainly be paying a visit. Stephenville, Tex., has such a Wiki profile because of some widely publicized sightings in 2008, and, sure enough, "CHASING UFOS," a series that begins Friday night at 9 on the National Geographic Channel, makes Stephenville its first stop. The show resembles other extraterrestrial-oriented series like "UFO Hunters" on History, but the three investigators - James Fox, Ben McGee and Erin Ryder - have an amusing chemistry. They bring different degrees of skepticism to the search for evidence on whether visitors from outer space have stopped by. In Stephenville, after interviewing residents about the 2008 sightings, they end up with their own lights-in-the-sky story to tell. They also spend time worried about a more earthbound threat: wild hogs, which lurk in the scrub land where they are doing night research. This suggests what would be one of the odder crossover episodes in TV history: "Chasing UFOs" and the A&E show "American Hoggers." The hog wranglers on that series, who have seen farms devastated by the animals, would no doubt be glad to herd them all onto a flying saucer and send them skyward. FOR years now dance audiences - especially those interested in progressive, contemporary work - have suffered through terribly slim pickings when it comes to New York's summer festivals. Sure, there are lots of free events. But, as a longtime dancegoer muttered to me a while back, rolling her eyes, the offerings mostly seem like the equivalent of "graffiti in the park." This year, finally, there is reason for hope. The revamped RIVER TO RIVER FESTIVAL has an impressive dance lineup, with this week alone including site-specific creations throughout Lower Manhattan by Tara O'Con, Maria Hassabi, Luciana Achugar and Beth Gill. Intriguingly, all of these choreographers will be revisiting pieces they created for New York theaters. Ms. Hassabi's "Show" had its premiere at the Kitchen, but the other artists were originally commissioned by the Chocolate Factory (Ms. Achugar was also commissioned by Abrons Arts Center), which has a pretty great track record when it comes to dance. How will these smart, exacting choreographers deal (or not deal) with the chaos of New York's streets? It's a tantalizing question. And how exciting (for them and for us) that their works will get a second life. For times and locations, (212) 219-9401, rivertorivernyc.com; free. LET'S face it: When it comes to new theater, it's pretty dead right now. It's the time of year when savvy theatergoers take a vacation. Until some interesting festivals arrive soon, one new musical that does stand out is "DOGFIGHT," an Off Broadway production based on a 1991 movie starring River Phoenix and Lili Taylor. Continuing the recent trend of adapting obscure films (see "Once"), "Dogfight," an intimate period piece, is about a group of Marines who play a cruel game to see who can find the ugliest girl to take home before shipping out for Vietnam. That a character played by Lili Taylor was picked is bizarre. While the plot begins like a nasty Neil LaBute drama, it turns unexpectedly romantic. It divided critics. The Times's Vincent Canby dismissed it as a "wan love story" with a sitcom sensibility. Roger Ebert was far more sympathetic, praising its delicacy, before adding, "Maybe you have to be a little idealistic to even enjoy this movie." Joe Mantello, who has the most diverse résumé of top-tier directors, stages this Second Stage production with music and lyrics by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul. Performances start Wednesday, Second Stage Theater, 305 West 43rd Street, Clinton; (212) 246-4422, 2st.com. GUNS don't kill people in Roberto Rossellini's 1952 fablelike film "THE MACHINE THAT KILLS BAD PEOPLE." A magical camera does, and its operator, Celestino (Gennaro Pisano), uses its power to punish the evildoers in his contentious town, perched on a rocky outcrop above the sea. Turns out, though, everyone is venal, from the scheming rich to the scheming poor. Moral: Don't be too quick to judge. Rossellini, the great neo-Realist, operates in a different key here, emphasizing the fairy-tale quality of his story right from the start: A hand reaches into the frame to arrange pieces of a set - mountains, the sea, the town - and then puts down cutout commedia dell'arte-style characters. The neo-Realist impulse isn't entirely absent, but mostly we're in an exaggerated, comic universe, the kind where a special coffin is needed to accommodate a man's arm, frozen in a fascist salute. BAMCinemaFest, which pulls in movies from festivals around the world, presents this rare Rossellini comedy, making its North American premiere. 9:15 p.m. Monday, BAM Rose Cinemas, Brooklyn Academy of Music, 30 Lafayette Avenue, at Ashland Place, Fort Greene; (718) 636-4100, bam.org. AS the art scene in New York City begins its slow pleasure cruise into summer, Bard College's Center for Curatorial Studies in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., is picking up speed to celebrate its 20th anniversary. "Anti-Establishment," a group show that examines contemporary art's relationship with art institutions, opened Saturday. The same day the center's Hessel Museum of Art opened a survey of work from the 1990s by Liam Gillick, a British artist who moved to New York in 1998 and has become an investigator of art's interconnections with architecture, design and cultural power structures. The exhibition, "FROM 199A TO 199B: LIAM GILLICK," brings together work from his pre-America days, when he and a group of Europeans set the terms of what came to be known as "relational aesthetics," which reconsidered art as something that viewers and institutions create almost as much as artists. One work, " (The What If? Scenario) Dining Table," from 1996, is simply a table-tennis table covered in glitter, with no net or instructions, an open-ended invitation to invention, play or only looking. This time around, the curator has thoughtfully provided paddles. Through Dec. 21, (845) 758-7598, bard.edu/ccs.