The Comment Box: Some dance critics are trying to claim ice skating as an art form, but it's hard to get past the frozen smiles and smug cuteness, writes Michael Seaver

Despite an increasing Irish presence, the Winter Olympics still mean little to us. Alpine skiing or curling hardly inspire you to shout at the television. The one event that generates at least passing interest is figure-skating. Some of those who watch it will, like me, hark back to their one and only visit to Dolphin's Barn ice rink and marvel at the effortless speed and skill. For others it's just televisual bubblegum. Whatever the reason for tuning in, it remains the most popular sport in the Winter Olympics.

So why does it qualify for the arts page as well as the sports section? The question has haunted figure-skating since the inaugural world championships and first Olympic championship, in 1976. As the sports journalist Frank Keating wrote in 1984, how can an Olympic medal be won for enacting the scenario of "two young people unable to marry, who climb a volcanic mountain to hurl themselves into the blazing inferno"?

He was referring to Torvill and Dean's Bolero, which received a row of perfect 6.0s for artistic impression at the 1984 Olympics. Some dance critics were as impressed as the judges. Alasdair Macauley, writing in Dance Theatre Journal, compared it to the love duet and liebestod in Wagner's Tristan And Isolde.

Art or sport? In the heyday of Torvill and Dean, dance writers such as Macauley and Anna Kisselgoff, of the New York Times, were happy to claim ice dance as their own. Competitions allow a free dance, accounting for 50 per cent of the total marks, and critics have zealously deconstructed these routines, giving skaters intellectual kudos that is at odds with the flamboyant tackiness that prevails in competitions.

Stephanie Jordan and Helen Thomas, two intellectual heavyweights in dance academia, reckoned that Torvill and Dean were unique in the way they "presented the imagery of idealism, power and virtuosity (so close to the images of sport, which ironically fails to live up to such metaphors) as part of a cogent, expressive, poeticised statement". Dean went on to choreograph a ballet, Encounters, for English National Ballet in 1996.

Impressive stuff. But like ballroom dancing, ice dancing thrives on competition, and whereas ballroom dancers perform or compete in a group, wearing numbers, skaters perform individually, commanding full attention from judges and audience. Each routine is a performance, carefully paced to generate applause, and none did this better than Dean. "The old trick seems to get applause," he said in 1984. "As much as we don't like to do it, that's what they [the judges] are telling us, that we must be more flamboyant. We concentrated on technicalities and intricate footwork, but it seems that they want more flourishes and show business."

In many ways John Curry, the American skater who won a gold medal in 1976, paved the way. Noted for his choreography as well as his performances, Curry built on his Olympic success and formed a professional company, Theatre of Skating. He invited leading choreographers from the dance world, such as Peter Darrell, Kenneth MacMillan and Twyla Tharp, to create works for him and brought ice dancing closer to art than to sport.

Dean rose to the judges' challenge to bring more show business into the rink, and his choreography was soon stretching conventions. Single pieces of music replaced the crude medleys, the dancers had equal importance and new lifts brought variety to the vocabulary. As innovations go these were harmless enough, but they were too much for the International Skating Union, which changed the rules to return to ballroom values.

It is commonly believed that Dean was the target of many of the rule changes, which included banning the guiding of a partner by skate or leg (a common move in Dean's work) and allowing only music that had a recognised beat.

Restricting development with constant rule changes makes a mockery of dance critics' attempts to legitimise ice dance on artistic grounds. What's even worse is the face glitter, silk shirts and cheap showbiz. Although we are told that Torvill and Dean brought a modern aesthetic to ice dance, it's hard to get past the frozen smiles and smug cuteness. So why are critics so eager to review these works?

Perhaps the key is the effortless speed of skaters. Television doesn't adequately reflect the exhilarating pace skaters reach as they trace long lines in space. "Skaters are nearly always travelling, and usually fast . . . Heads flung back and chests lifted, they communicate up and out to a huge crowd all around them, or, in pairs, they swing out from each other with an enormous centrifugal force," say Jordan and Thomas.

As in ballet, skaters seem to defy gravity. The natural line of the body is extended as they glide effortlessly across a white surface that in no way resembles earth. But is it all a self-deluding intellectual game or does dance criticism serve any useful purpose? In extending how we think about moving bodies in space, it is certainly valid. But enabling the development of ice dance as valid artistic expression is another matter. Weighed down by an eagerness to please, ice dance seems destined to remain smothered by old-fashioned regulations.

The latest controversy concerns the too-short skirts some dancers are now wearing, and one American judge, Nancy Meiss, has described some lifts as pornographic.

Shunned by purists from both sport and dance, ice dance is probably rightfully seen as light entertainment, a position it has always been comfortable with.

In 1994, ice skating became the second most popular sport on American television, and it is the most watched event at Salt Lake City. It's easy to see why. There's the glamour, the drama of the voting and even metaphors of struggle and strife, if you're so inclined.

This year we've had the added frisson of a judging controversy in the pairs skating competition (a different discipline to ice dancing) causing an enquiry from the International Skating Union and speculation that the International Olympic Council might abandon the sport.

Only those who were up very early this morning will know who won the ice-dancing final. It's a toss-up between the austere technique of China's Xue Shen and Hongbo Zhao - who might have included a quad salchow, a move other couples won't even attempt - and the Italian flamboyance of world champions Barbara Fusar Poli and Maurizio Margaglio. Technique versus showbiz? Sport versus art? This one will run and run.