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I qualify my comments on Eyes on Eve by mentioning the curtain rose at 7 p.m. and I arrived just before three performance prior to intermission, mid-way through Tom Mayock’s solo to Nina Simone’s I Am Released. He dances with ease and pleasure covering lateral space well with low jetes.

In JIH (2009) Wan-Chao Chang appeared in near-traditional male flamenco costume, a slender figure with an innate sense of form and proportion of her body in relation to space. Utilizing Stromica by Stellamara, she wove her way across the stage with softened flamenco port de bras and heel-work, which I was later informed was Bulgarian in tradition. Whatever the origin, Chang’s performance was distinctive, graceful and gently persuasive.

Mujeres, prior to intermission, was accompanied to a passionate vocal by El Moreno, piano and the wooden cajon, to which a section of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata was added as conclusion. Six dancers appeared to an “unknown choreographer”; excuse me, that constitutes a cop out; it neither was traditional nor innovative. Entrances and exits occurred at the commencement of the piece before some phrases did occur. The possible pause between movements belonged to the run and take a pose school, lacking impulse between sequences of motion. The credits cited at least two dancers elsewhere. I found the piece embarrassing.

Following intermission Holly Shaw’s solo sketched a woman artist beset with longing for a man whose portrait rested on an easel central stage right. She alternated between a low table mid-stage left attempting to paint to center stage where she undulated her hips. Concluding, she painted her arms terra cotta color, placing a tracing of the hue over the man’s portrait, perhaps a cry towards elemental sexual impulses.

Entregarse Al Amor, Surrender to Love, combined the flamenco bulerias form with Argentine tango. While interesting,execution was sluggish. The performers, nicely costumed by Alain Chavez, did not follow two maxims for dancers for fluidity in motion: backs held as if holding a walnut between the shoulder blades, and hips in line with diaphragm, to avoid sitting in the buttocks.

I quarrel with programs where text provides extended rationale with performance credits long on inspirational roots rather than actual experience or value-laden comments try influencing expectations. It assists not in the slightest. In future programs, producer Holly Shaw might ask for participants to employ the succinctness present in Mayock's performance credits, allowing viewers their own reactions. Would I also be out of turn in suggesting an outside viewer be asked to appraise a run-through to determine whether certain dances be allowed on the program?

Asian Improv aRrts at Counterpulse on Mission Street April 17 provided a forum for Genny Lim’s poetry and Melody Takata to perform an intriguing soliloquy wrapped in a traditional kimono and seen applying the traditional pasty white mask of the geisha, supported by samisen player Tatsu Aoki and saxophone artist Francis Wong. Such unusual programs rarely make great inroads on the theater-going public, but I, for one, find them appealing and absorbing; in the face of our stringent economics, those persisting in presenting such programs possess the makings of cultural heroes. By the bye, the spelling style reflects both the program and the producer’s name.

Takata clearly knows her Japanese buyo. She is taller than normally associated for someone of Japanese descent; also her movement conveys formative roots in an American environment. Takata accomplishes a nonetheless fascinating exploration of a search for her personal core in the face of a bi-polar parent and the dimunition of Japanese traditional arts and culture in the present day American culture. Even I, as an outside observer of San Francisco’s Japantown for the past thirty-five years, can testify to the inexorable inroads of Americanization.

Takata was supported by several young students who provided a touch of Chinese tradition with gold and later green swaths of cloth manipulated in the Chinese ribbon dance. They later were joined by two young taiko students, completing the program with Takata, sound and dynamics emphasizing the immediate and also the positive collective element of Japanese culture in taiko drumming.