V&A East Museum, Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park · Opens Sat 18 Apr · Permanent galleries free / Exhibition £22.50–24.50

London's biggest new museum in a generation opens this Saturday. O'Donnell + Tuomey's striking building on the old Olympic site houses two free permanent galleries — 500 objects spanning design, fashion and creativity, with work by Yinka Ilori, Molly Goddard, Alexander McQueen and Vivienne Westwood. But the headline is the inaugural exhibition, The Music is Black: A British Story, which traces 125 years of Black British music — from Winifred Atwell's piano to Joan Armatrading's childhood guitar (on display for the first time) to garments worn by Sade, Dame Shirley Bassey and Little Simz. Lovers rock, 2 tone, jungle, trip hop, grime — the genres that shaped the sound of this city, given the space they deserve. Open daily from 10am, late nights Thursdays and Saturdays until 10pm. Café Jikoni opens alongside it. Go this week — the first weekends will be electric.

Royal Festival Hall · Thu 16 Apr, 7.30pm · From £17

Tonight. The Aurora Orchestra performs Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring entirely from memory — no sheet music, no stands, no chairs. Nicholas Collon conducts. Actors Karl Queensborough and Sarah Twomey weave a dramatised narrative through the performance. This is the production that won the Golden Prague International Television Festival Grand Prix, and seeing it live is something else entirely: an orchestra standing among you, playing one of the most complex scores in the repertoire from inside their own heads. Part of the Southbank Centre's Multitudes festival, a two-week cross-disciplinary programme that runs through to the end of April. If you see one classical performance this spring, make it this one.

Coronet Theatre · Thu 17 – Fri 25 Apr · £15–45

The most important experimental theatre company in America comes to Notting Hill with a reworking of the piece that started it all. Nayatt School was the 1978 production that launched both the Wooster Group and Spalding Gray's career as an autobiographical monologist — a young man following sinister voices, built from fragments of T.S. Eliot's The Cocktail Party. This redux layers newly restored archival footage of Gray's original performance with a live recreation by the current company, including a monologue from founding member Kate Valk. It's a conversation between past and present, a meditation on memory and the theatre's relationship with its own ghosts. Eighty minutes. Unmissable if you care about what performance can be.

Roundhouse · Thu 16 & Fri 17 Apr

Two headliners, two nights, two entirely different kinds of intensity. Tonight, Kae Tempest celebrates the release of their new novel Having Spent Life Seeking — expect readings, spoken word, and the kind of room-holding presence that makes a thousand people forget to breathe. They'll be joined by Shon Faye and Travis Alabanza, with musical accompaniment from Hinako Omori. Every ticket includes a copy of the book. Tomorrow, Imogen Heap performs a world-exclusive evening alongside her aliases Him Gone Ape and ai.mogen — songs, improvisation, and conversation that blurs the line between human creativity and its digital shadow. The Three Sixty festival marks the Roundhouse's 20th anniversary as an arts venue, with over a thousand tickets at £5 or less.

Somerset House · Opens Thu 17 Apr · Until 4 May

Over 300 photographs fill Somerset House's West and East Wings — the year's strongest images from student, youth, open and professional competitions worldwide. This year's Outstanding Contribution to Photography goes to Joel Meyerowitz, the pioneer of colour street photography whose work helped legitimise shooting in colour when the art world insisted on black and white. The winners were announced last night. An artist talk with Meyerowitz on 21 April at Logan Hall is worth booking now. The exhibition runs just under three weeks and is always one of the most quietly rewarding shows of the spring.

Also This Week

Grace Pervades

Haymarket Theatre Royal · Opens Thu 23 Apr · Until 11 Jul

Ralph Fiennes and Miranda Raison in a new David Hare play about the greatest partnership in English stage history — Victorian actors Henry Irving and Ellen Terry. Hare writes. Hare directs. Fiennes plays Irving, the first actor ever knighted, a man who transformed British theatre and destroyed himself doing it. This is the kind of event-theatre that fills a room with people who know exactly what they're about to see and can't wait. Opens next Thursday.

Next week

White Cube Bermondsey · Opens Wed 22 Apr · Until 31 May · Free

The first major UK presentation to fully encompass the breadth and scale of Katharina Grosse's approach to painting. New works made in her New Zealand studio alongside sculpture and immersive large-scale pieces sprayed in situ, plus rarely seen canvases from the artist's personal archive. An artist conversation with Tom Morton on Mon 21 Apr at 5pm precedes the public opening. This is painting as environment — colour that doesn't stay on the canvas.

Opens 22 April

Royal Academy · Closes Sun 19 Apr · From £21

This is it — the final weekend. The first British woman to occupy all of the Royal Academy's main galleries, and she's 91 years old. Ninety-plus works — joyful, raw, enormous — alive with Nicole Kidman, Kill Bill, Elizabeth I, and animals painted directly with her hands. If you haven't been, you have three days. After Sunday, it's gone.

3 days left

National Portrait Gallery · Closes Mon 4 May · £22

170 rarely-seen drawings and preparatory studies alongside the paintings they became — an unprecedented look inside Freud's working process. The intimacy of the sketches changes how you see the finished portraits. Tours to Louisiana in Denmark this summer, but seeing it here, in the building Freud painted in, is the point. Three weeks left.

18 days left

Padella Soho

2 Kingly Street, Soho · Opens today

Ten years since Padella first opened in Borough Market, and only their third restaurant in that decade. The Soho site on Kingly Street brings the pici cacio e pepe and the eight-hour Hereford beef shin ragu to a room with a 1960s-style downstairs lounge and private dining. No bookings — just show up early and expect a queue. It will be worth it.

Just opened

Café Jikoni

V&A East, Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park · Opens Sat 18 Apr

Ravinder Bhogal and Nadeem Lalani Nanjuwany bring their beloved Marylebone restaurant to London's newest museum. An all-day café with global fusion cookery — prawn toast scotch egg, turmeric and ginger chicken pie, Bombay sandwich with green chutney — inside the V&A East building. The first museum café in years that might actually be worth the visit on its own.

Opens Saturday