The remarkable Russian Ice Stars come to Oxford next week with their production of Snow White and DAVID BELLAN talks to the producer Vee Delplidge

Every time I have seen the Russian Ice Stars I have been impressed with their artistry. With a cast including international competition skaters and an Olympic gymnast, you can take grace of movement for granted, but what is far more difficult is to take a bunch of skaters however good they may be and to forge with them works that are far more than the ice-panto you might expect from a repertoire that includes Cinderella, Snow White and Peter Pan.

What they have achieved is to produce dance works on ice that have real depth and beauty as well as humour and virtuosity.

Vee Delplidge is the founder of this company. She has had a lifelong love of ballet and skating and decided about a dozen years ago to put the two together.

John Curry had tried it, of course, but he had literally, and quite successfully, attempted to put pure ballet on to ice, even, as he once showed me, riskily cutting great chunks out of his skating boots in order to be able to point his toe. But audiences had been limited, despite his world fame.

So I asked Vee how she set the level for these performances, retaining the excitement of skating, but making them into something to be taken seriously at the same time.

"The ballet purists will not accept ballet on ice and, at the same time, if you mention ballet to a lot of people in my audiences you frighten them to death, so I had to find a happy medium.

"But I wanted my shows to look beautiful and graceful. I hate it when I see ice shows and the arms are all over the place, the heads are wrong and the skaters are all out of line it looks so messy, so bad.

"I'm a bit of a perfectionist. I'm making corrections right up to the last day of a tour, but I want the perfection of ballet applied to an ice show, and all the people involved in putting it together have a ballet background."

Cavaliere Guiseppe Arena (Cavaliere is the Italian equivalent of a knighthood, awarded for his choreography) is the man who choreographed the opening ceremony of this year's Winter Olympics, and also the man who turned Vee Delplidge's dreams into reality.

A former classical dancer, he was a member, and then a teacher, of La Scala Ballet Company in Milan, appearing on stage with artists such as Fonteyn and Nureyev. This is where he picked up his very individual style.

He started making dances very early in his career and was drawn into the world of skating when he was asked to devise routines for several champion ice-dance couples. Now he combines this experience with the sense of theatre that comes from his stage background.

"I still can't skate, and it's too late for me to start now," he tells me. "But I know what I can ask of skaters, and I know what I want to achieve in terms of artistic expression."

As a non-skater, does he sometimes ask for a movement that's impossible for skaters, particularly on the relatively tiny stages they're working on?

"Probably" he laughs, "but now I have had many years experience with skaters, so it doesn't happen very often. But creating something original is what they pay me for, and we can always discuss any difficulties and try to put things right. I work very much to the music and I follow the logic of the body, and the body shows me where to go with the whole movement."

Does he start to make a work, as many choreographers do, by asking the dancers to try various possibilities, or does he come to rehearsal with everything more or less mapped out?

"I never say try'. They do what I ask them to do. I have storyboards setting out how the scenes are going to look and develop, and then I listen to the music, and it tells me what I'm going to do with the dancers. On the ice you can have very big movements, very expressive, and I want to make the skaters talk with their bodies in the same way that dancers do."

Silvio Amato's specially commissioned score works well as the background to this production, but, as usual, it's the skating, the personalities of the skaters, and the way in which Arena uses their dramatic qualities and acting ability to breathe life into the story, that makes it such a success.

This Snow White is much as we know it, except that we have seven woodsmen (two of them, amusingly, are bearded girls!) instead of Disney's dwarves, and the evil queen is now a beautiful witch.

It always seems extraordinary to me that, in addition to dancing the story, so many skaters can perform on a small stage without crashing and falling during the high-speed routines, and that they can do their jumps and spins without the huge run-ups available in competition arenas. Succeeding, and making it all mean something, is quite an achievement.

The Russian Ice Stars are at the New Theatre, Oxford, from Thursday to Sunday, May 7. The box office is on 0870 606 3500.