Sachiyo Ito.

Unphysicality seems at times to be a staple of Japanese dance. The performer sculpts a stillness ever so slowly with her body, never really giving up on it. She coaxes her inner state charily outward, where it hovers, semitransparent. Allowing her to achieve all this are those unassuming steps taken by the woman's modest, white-socked feet; the restrictions and reductions of the muted hand gestures; her impermeably lyrical face; that measured, minimal use of theatrical space. The dance's purity and almost parsimonious simplicity mean that nothing in it isn't aesthetic.

No matter how often you see Japanese dance, the art tends to keep itself partway secret, untranslatable, and maybe all the more admirable for its private, withheld quality. Celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of her American debut, Sachiyo Ito illuminated the enigma of the dance with a gracious, practiced touch on a program that surveyed various regional and historical traditions and sometimes mingled the modern with them.

She had help. Former Erick Hawkins dancer Mariko Tanabe put in an appearance, as did drummers, a koto player (Masayo Ishigure), and Asian Cultural Council director Ralph Samuelson, who played the shakuhacki. But it was Ito who presided stealthily, like an understated, emanating bit of ribbon.

Her performance as a courtesan saying goodbye to her lover in Hanafu, an Okinawan dance, was especially lovely, fluid and slippery yet all of a piece. By contrast, Ito's version of the classic Ama no Iwato (1997), which tells the story of dance's legendary birth in Japan, was a gaily kitschy stage melodrama that included a goddess in a livid purple kimono and culminated in a New Age beam of sunlight. Rambunctiousness guided Ito's folksy Uhkui (1992), intended to honor ancestral spirits during the Bon festival. The same dancer, however, also evoked a crane, starkly and softly disembodied. Somehow, Ito herself seems to disappear when she dances -- it is one of her most lasting signatures.