Silesian Dance Theatre.

After a brief appearance at the American Dance Festival last summer, Silesian Dance Theatre made what it called its "official" American debut last fall at the Wexner Center for the Arts. The seven-member modern dance company, Poland's first, was founded by Jacek Luminski in 1991.

Program notes boast lofty creative aims: hammering out meaningful modern dance from Poland's folk traditions and from one of the country's most significant, if maligned, ethnic constituencies, the Jews. Based on these performances, Luminski has yet to achieve his goals.

On the first of two programs the company presented four works. The music changed, the titles and the works' suggested meanings changed; the movement vocabulary did not. The body language Luminski draws upon turns out to be quite limited in scope. Its meaning seems to derive from context, and from subtle gestures of the arms and hands. Few Americans have enough familiarity with Poland to interpret such detail. After a half-hour or so, the performance took on a mind-numbing sameness.

An overall sensibility, however, did emerge--a sense of fear, desperation, and futility. The troupe's young dancers--fit, though unevenly gifted--performed with complete conviction as they hurled their bodies in superfast, uncentered twirls. They rushed up to each other, gave passionless embraces, and then crumpled to the floor as though they'd been shot. They ran their hands over their faces as though trying to quiet a facial tic.

Even in what passed for the program's pas de deux, Yearnings II, the pair of dancers (Agnieszka Noster and Mariusz Olszewski) moved without romance, and certainly without eroticism. Throughout the evening, the dancers' facial expressions never changed, never lightened. Silesia, a region with a long history of unstable borders and persecution, has not produced a happy dance troupe.