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Fifty years ago in the same Opera House where the United Nations Charter was signed (1945), the formal peace treaty was concluded with Japan, after some of the 110,000 Japanese American citizens, ignominiously incarcerated in ten inhospitable inland locations, were released to return to an uncertain future in their former towns and cities or to start life anew elsewhere.

This poignant paradox and five decades of exchange, enterprise and human mellowing are being celebrated with a variety of performances in city plaza, on stages and at the Asian Art Museum, where a spectacular exhibition of over a hundred Zen paintings, 17th to the 20th centuries, have been on display since late June.

The program credits list the acclaim accorded to Hans Peter Kuhn and Rolf Julius, from the Venice Biennale and the Paris Biennale to the Bessie Award and Soundfestival, Japan. Less is said about Junko Wada who has appeared at art festivals in Bogota, Columbia; Istanbul and Adelaide. The trio were brought to San Francisco with the support of the Goethe Institut, and what I saw was the only evening of a trio of performances.

What a pity. Before describing her and her work, after her performance I almost felt Odette and The Dying Swan should go into indefinite retirement. Surely a provocative reaction, but if a viewer can accept deliberation in aesthetic statement, Wada is home by a country mile. But I also have to tell you it is a very Japanese country mile, for the first piece is titled Soba Fields and the second Chidori III, soba being a buckwheat noted for being made into noodles and Chidori a bird native to Japan whose habitat is always close to bodies of water. And Wada, a Japanese-born modern dancer, possesses the certain flexibility of one who has grown up with a mat culture, where living on tatami has accustomed the legs and torsos to a flexibility achieved in the West usually by conscious exercise.

What to mention first? Perhaps Wada herself, who is tall and almost anorexic with a frame tall for most Japanese, hands, fingers and feet whose dexterity, sensitivity and flexibility seemed independent of her legs and torso, which were themselves eloquent messengers of the two portraits she so assiduously constructed. With her short black hair, wide set eyes in a face which shaped down like the tip of an almond, her pool of concentration permitted use to look at a visual abstraction tinged with an angelic sweetness. Forget Botticelli or Lancome - Wada could be the prototype. With her costumes, a spotted floor length silk of browns, in almost even stripes and blobs, accented by an undergarment of turquoise for Soba Fields, and a thick, textured deep royal blue with orange at the neck for Chidori III, the audience was confronted with a singularly eloquent instrument.

For Soba Fields Wada moved across two or three white electronic lines which linked three or four sound squares. She balanced, and looked, and at odd moments, certainly not in any measurable sequence would hop across the electronic lines like a bird picking its way across a field, looking for food. Occasionally one elbow would go up, a bird wing adjusting itself. At one or two moments Wada ruffled her hair. Almost always the hands were clutched like articulate bird's feet, each joint and finger both allied and curiously separate. Her face looked out with the blank, piercing and focused gaze of the bird in a vast field, minute adjustments being continually made in response to location, weather, season, time or day and possible activity. The movement went slowly down the wire and installation and then partially back before Wada's bird halted, the birds' feet became her own fingers once more and she bowed to the audience. The piece took somewhere between thirty and forty-five absorbing minutes.

Chidori III was a bird resting, the slight swaying of the body reflecting the ebb and flow of the creature resting on water. The curious blank gaze of the bird was, if anything, even more intensified, and the ruffle and rise of wings more pronounced, as her Chidori, in richly textured deep blue, rose briefly above the water and endured the buffeting of high winds and strong crests and depths of waves. Half way through this twenty minute piece she shed the blue to reveal rich and varied hues of orange, presumably a reflection of the feet of the Chidori as a water creature, and of some mutation of which I am ignorant. This study did more with wing like movements and the aerial possibilities, as well as a bird fighting for equilibrium in stormy winds and wild waves.

The contrast of earth and water and bird life could not have been more cogently or exhaustively portrayed. Wada has carried the deliberation of Noh into the modern idiom, expressing its range and depth of understatement in a new way. The measured exposition is shared with Butoh, but Wada's birds remain creatures of nature not studies in lower human depth. It is good to be reminded that profundity is not necessarily dependent on the dark side of human nature, but instead relies on a meticulous reflection and interpretation of nature, in whatever form.