Akram Khan Troupe in Montclair While Khan Recovers From Injury THE choreographer Akram Khan isn't given much to sitting still. "This is torture," he moaned, perched on a couch in his South London house, one leg heavily bandaged around the ankle and awkwardly propped to his side on a cushion. The timing could hardly be worse for Mr. Khan, who snapped an Achilles" tendon while rehearsing in Paris in early January. He had performances scheduled there with the superstar ballerina Sylvie Guillem. His participation in the opening ceremony of the London Olympics and collaboration with its director, Danny Boyle, had just been confirmed. And he and his company were about to embark on a North American tour that ends Feb. 12 at the Peak Performances series at Montclair State University in New Jersey. While Mr. Khan has been obliged to remain immobilized and to cancel performances of his recent, much acclaimed solo "Desh," his troupe, the Akram Khan Company, has gone ahead with the tour, performing his 2010 "Vertical Road." The injury seems unlikely to get in the way of Mr. Khan's busy life. No sooner had he lamented his enforced immobility than he brightened up. "I have to believe that this will lead to something else," he said. No doubt it will. Even judging by the standards of a career that has - at least in Britain - been meteoric, he has never been at a more successful point. After a brilliant start with his first group piece, "Kaash" (2002), and the hit "Zero Degrees" (2005) with Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Antony Gormley, Mr. Khan spent some years augmenting his fame, if not his choreographic reputation, with high-profile duets created with Ms. Guillem ("Sacred Monsters") and the actress Juliette Binoche ("In-I"). But the three works he has made since 2010 have been acclaimed as a scintillating return to form. And through his participation in the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games, Mr. Khan is likely to become known to an extraordinary number of people who might never otherwise see contemporary dance. "It's top secret; I can't talk about it," he said when asked what exactly he would be doing. For the moment, however, Mr. Khan, 37, is one of those artists whose fame at home has not translated into equal renown across the ocean. Although his work has been seen sporadically over the last decade at some of New York City's mainstream dance houses, he doesn't hold the same position in the American contemporary-dance firmament that he occupies in Britain. "He is one of our leading contemporary artists," said Alistair Spalding, the director of Sadler's Wells Theater, where Mr. Khan is an associate artist. He has a specific, fascinating physical language, but part of his success here is that there is a narrative in his work about displacement and identity, and he is speaking to a contemporary audience in London who also understand those issues. Mr. Khan's ambivalence about his identity as a second-generation immigrant - born to Bangladeshi parents but formed by the urban youth culture of London - is perhaps the central theme in his work, and it is given literal physical expression in his particular fusion of contemporary dance idioms with the classical Indian dance form kathak. "As an American sitting in New Jersey, Akram's pieces show me the evolution of English culture and how it has been informed and excited by world culture," said Jedediah Wheeler, the artistic director of Peak Performances and a consistent supporter of many choreographers in Europe (Wayne McGregor, Robyn Orlin, Jan Fabre) whose work is otherwise little seen on the East Coast. I don't see that debate about cultural identity playing out in the same way here. Mr. Khan said: "I like Jed's vision and that he is daring. That's what New York needs, a bit of daring from Europe. We get so much work from the U.S., but so little goes from here to New York. Mr. Khan has been dancing since he was 3: first Bengali folk dance, then kathak, which he began at 7 with the master teacher Sri Pratap Pawar. Informed by rhythmic footwork, stylized yet fluid arm and hand gestures, and rapid spins punctuated by sudden stillness, kathak is a dance form of extreme complexity and subtlety. The discipline required was intense, Mr. Khan said, and it was not the dancing he enjoyed as a child, but the attention. Onstage, the moment I said something, people listened. At one of his dance school performances, Mr. Khan was spotted by the theater and film director Peter Brook, who cast him in the 1985 play "Mahabharata," based on the epic Indian poem. He toured the world for two years with that production. "It was one of those pieces that change your life, because it destroys all your knowledge of what theater is and can be," he said. When it ended, and I came back to London, it was very traumatic. After high school he studied contemporary dance at De Montfort University in Leicester ("Asian communities are very big on qualifications"), encountering other dance forms for the first time. "I didn't even know what contemporary dance was," he said. In the classical world, whether it's kathak or ballet, there is right and wrong, you know the story, how it will end. Here there were just questions. After Mr. Khan had moved, two years later, to the Northern School of Contemporary Dance in Leeds, the Dance Umbrella festival got wind of the unusual merging of kathak and contemporary movement that he was experimenting with in his own work. Given a performance slot in a fringe production, he attracted immediate attention. "He had an extraordinary, distinctive quality onstage," Mr. Spalding said, recalling his first sight of Mr. Khan dancing. A great sense of gravity and upper body and neck strength, but moving into a contemporary language. Mr. Spalding later commissioned "Zero Degrees," and the big-name collaborations with Ms. Guillem and Ms. Binoche followed. "I hated "In-I" actually," Mr. Khan said, "but it's one of the pieces that taught me the most because it was flawed." But with "Gnosis," "Vertical Road" and "Desh," Mr. Khan has returned to the questions that most preoccupy him as a choreographer. Identity, spirituality, the earthbound and the transcendent: these are the ideas that Mr. Khan keeps coming back to in these three works. "Vertical Road," choreographed to music by his frequent collaborator Nitin Sawhney, is inspired by Sufism and the Persian poet Rumi. Meditative and ecstatic in turns, it is also opaque and mysterious. "Although I often draw from my own experience, I'm not interested in showing reality onstage," Mr. Khan said. Theater is about something else. The Akram Khan Company will perform on Feb. 8, 10, 11 and 12 at the Alexander Kasser Theater, Montclair State University, Montclair, N.J.