96 Hours: Strawberry Picking

Nothing tastes better on a hot summer day than fresh berries and cream, and in the Bay Area, we're lucky enough to be able to get our hands on some of the best organic strawberries and olallieberries in the country. You could pick your fruit at the local Whole Foods, but why not pick it right from the plant?

Just off Highway 1 north of Santa Cruz, Swanton Berry Farm offers berry aficionados the chance to roam their fields and collect a perfect basket of fruit while enjoying the sun, breezes and spectacular views over the Pacific. With warm days in the sun and cool nights wrapped in ocean fog, conditions on these coast-side acres are ripe for growing sweet, flavorful berries. One bite of a succulent Swanton strawberry and you'll see why they're so prized by connoisseurs like local jammaker June Taylor, who uses strawberries from the farm in her renowned preserves.

Read more on the SF Chronicle site.

"A Beautiful Tragedy" and the life at the Perm State Ballet School

Dancers spend a lot of time on Youtube watching as many videos as we can, so when one of my students mentioned a dance film I hadn't seen, I was a little surprised. But after he sent me the link, I spent probably the better part of an hour watching clips of David Kinsella's beautiful and yet highly disturbing film. "A Beautiful Tragedy" follows the progress of a 15-year old girl named Oksana Skorik, a student at the famed Perm State Ballet School -- a place which has turned out some of the world's most refined dancers.

It's not unlike watching a terrible tragic accident: so upsetting that you can't look away.

In pursuit of a career in dance, (as much for her mother as for herself) Oksana works, starves, battles loneliness, and takes heaps of verbal abuse from her teachers, notably Lidiya Ulanova, who calls the girls idiots and angrily tells them they're insolent and stuffed dummies.

"Why would a teacher do that?" wonders my student aloud. "What kind of a person is that?"

I have no good answers. But almost more disturbing is the thought that so many people think this is the way to make good dancers. Skorik went into the Kirov Ballet, and her classmate Masha Menchikova went to the Perm company. Success came to them, but how much more beautiful could they have been without the abuse?

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You can order the film in both NTSC and PAL formats from Faction Film.

Dance Review: Scott Wells & Dancers in "Home Again"

Too often in dance the word "line" is used to describe a static pose, but Scott Wells & Dancers' deft style of contact improvisation reminds us that "lines" should be continuous threads of movement that roll, knot, ravel and occasionally seem to trail off into space - concepts of motion turned into a physical reality.

It's a particular pleasure to see the company back in the cavernous, cathedral-like Project Artaud, which beautifully frames the airborne flights of Wells' 16th season, presented by ODC Theater through Saturday at Artaud, a temporary home while the ODC venue undergoes renovation.

Beyond the drama of what look like dangerously high-flying antics, Wells' dancers have a talent for drawing audiences into the exhilaration of launching a body through the air, and sharing the satisfaction of timing so accurate, it makes clipping onto a trusty partner look easy. In his 2007 "Gym Mystics," Wells' gleeful sense of play pervades the piece from the moment Rajendra Serber launches himself at a free-standing wooden beam to the simultaneous tumbles and cartwheels of eight dancers criss-crossing the stage speckled with Allen Wilner's smoky lighting.

Read more on the Chronicle site.