When Tchaikovsky wrote “Swan Lake” in 1877, it’s unlikely he envisioned the ballet would ever be performed on ice. It’s also unlikely in 1998 that any of the regular theatergoers at the Maine Center ever expected to see a small ice rink on the stage there.

Three days ago, however, a Florida-based company installed a 45-by-37-foot rink at the Maine Center for the Arts in Orono, and on Friday, the St. Petersburg State Ice Ballet twice performed a crystalline version of the ballet there.

Combining ballet and skating seems natural enough, since both are elegant, graceful and demanding. Plus, figure skating has always borrowed from dance.

But when the lights came up on the rink at the Maine Center, it seemed impossible that any type of skating could really get off the ground on such a small block of ice. How would the skaters get up enough speed? What about those clunky skates? And the slicing sound of ice?

As it turns out, the skaters can’t wind up the way Olympic skaters can. There’s just not enough room. Yet the St. Petersburg corps had the finesse and control to execute fantastic feats of strength and beauty. So what if you didn’t know whether to call it a pirouette or an axel. It joined high art with frosty athleticism for a delightful new form of entertainment.

The swishes and clicks of skates on the ice quickly faded into the background as the dancers — more than 30 of them — glided and hopped and tapped across the rink. Eventually, when the shavings of ice flew from below a skate, it wasn’t distracting. The dance and smoothness of the movement, choreographed by Konstatin Rassadin, who was trained at the Kirov Ballet, took over the imagination of the audience.

In addition to the icy thrills of the action, the costumes were opulent and rich in grand fairy-tale fashion. If you were lucky enough to be seated near little girls, then you were listening not only to the lively performance of Tchaikovsky, but to gasps of excitement, too.

At times, it seemed as if the audience should be holding up scorecards to rate the performance (the jester was a 10, the prince a 9, Odetta and Odilla were both 10s). And when there was a slip or a near fall, you could feel the fearful tension of the audience. In this way, the ice ballet was slightly more electric than ballet. But mostly, it felt as if a company of dancers had moved right into a local living room for an enchanting show of ballet on ice.