E-Mail This Article to a Friend Far from India Anikai Dance at Boston University BY DEBRA CASH

When Somerville choreographer Wendy Jehlen publicized her new Boston-based contemporary dance company, Anikai, she explained that her work was grounded in her two-decades-long study of classical Indian dance. I was intrigued. American dancers have been riffing on the arts of India — creating, if you will, an imaginary India of the mind — at least since Ruth St. Denis draped herself in saris back in the second decade of the previous century. One of the most original new choreographic voices to emerge in the West in the past decade is Londoner Akram Khan, whose dizzying contemporary ensemble work grows directly out of the overlapping rhythms and discipline of South Indian kathak. Anikai’s other dancers came with backgrounds in Japanese butoh, Senegalese dance, and Brazilian capoeira. On paper, it looked to be a company where multiculturalism could flourish, distinctions would be cherished, and Boston dance would expand with new accents.

We’ve recently seen some superb Indian dance ranging from the involved epics presented in the Academy of Indian Performing Arts series to the exquisitely modest maidens visiting from the dance village of Nrityagram. For those artists, articulate hands, precisely stamping feet, and coyly raised eyebrows join in a syntax rich enough to narrate the details of encounters between gods and mortals. Jehlen’s modernist move — from narrative to abstract movement and from invocation of specific character to ambient feeling — unmoors Indian dance from its natural language.

Anikai’s debut concert in Boston University’s spanking new dance theater last weekend was patterned in a series of solos Jehlen had made for herself alternating with ensemble works, all to music by her husband, Nandlal Nayak. To judge by the evidence of this program, Nayak is a musician of great range, from classical sitar embroideries to something close to technopop. It’s clear that Jehlen delights in the finger play of Indian mudras, adjusting her invisible earrings in Angikam, clawing at her belly as if delivering her own entrails to a demanding God in Job 10. She’s fluent in American sign language and has worked as an interpreter. No surprise that her hands are eloquent.

Those hands, however, surpass her other skills by a significant margin. Angikam looked at best like a young dancer’s arangetram, or debutante dance performance, where the choreography is designed so that the youngster has to manage with only one part of her body at a time.

Jehlen hasn’t yet mastered making decisions about stage space. The best moments in the program incorporated some choreographic constraint that offered the movement, and the dancer executing it, some external structure. In Job 10, the constraint was the boundary offered by a big square of light. As Jehlen stood and roiled in that space, her toes reached only as far as its edges, enhancing the claustrophobia of a score in which a babble of women’s voices in Japanese and English recited sentences like "I am disgusted with life" and "If I am righteous, I cannot lift up my hand." In Hamsafar, a work in progress made in collaboration with dancers DeAnna Pellecchia, Ingrid Schatz, and Alissa Cardone, a diagonal arrow of light crossing the floor created a sense of destination. Framed by that journey, the dancers could lope like primates and swish through greased leapfrogging pile-ups.

Absent external structure, the choreography falls to pieces. Haaaa and Crane seem to be about the personal search for enlightenment through meditation. Neither developed beyond its initial impulse. Crane had the dancers lying in cruciform positions on the floor and rising as if mastering Pilates mat work. In the even weaker Haaaa, the dancers did yogic breathing.

Crane’s choreography was peppered with little solos that allowed each dancer to perform his or her "native" specialties. Genevieve Hyacinthe (what a great name!) waved with sassy West African shoulder shrugs; Pape N’Diaye took scooping lunges with his arms pulsing from deep in his back. Yet instead of showcasing their talents, these ways of moving looked like cheating. Instead of inspiring Jehlen to look beyond her own training, they seemed pasted on top of the blander abstract reaching and falling.

Anikai represents good intentions a long way from fulfillment. In its quest for attaining the open, receptive state of "beginner’s mind," this is still a beginner’s dance company.

Debra Cash is dance critic for WBUR Online Arts.