This is without doubt the most bizarre show I have seen. The company of 15 women, none of whom weighs less than 15 stone, comes from Perm in Russia. It was founded with the intention of showing that you don’t have to be thin to dance. Rightly realizing that they can hardly be taken seriously as an ensemble, the company has gone for comedy, and the first part is vaguely related to Swan Lake. Tatyana Gladkikh is Odette — she can actually get on pointe, but heaven knows what it does to her toes! Eight young chickens, in tutus and curly wigs like green Astro-turf, want to turn into beautiful swans, and are bossed about by their mother hen, the fierce and sizeable Ekaterina Yurkova.

Clement Crisp — doyen of this country’s dance critics — once wrote of a skated Swan Lake: “The music is arranged with the delicacy of the abattoir.” Here, too. Tchaikovsky’s hacked-about score is put to strange purposes; the Spanish dance is six round girls swirling like pink birthday cakes; the Prince’s lonely solo now three glistening dancers with their bingo-winged arm-movements seemingly related to semaphore, and so on.

A lot of this is really funny, and the women have a loveable charm, but the fact that one is being asked to laugh at their ludicrousness, rather than at their comedic skills, is slightly disconcerting.

In the second half, four skinny boy dancers join a variety of scenes, with the cast as harem slaves, sailors, nomads and gypsies. Here their dancing is better and more relaxed. The women are dressed increasingly revealingly, until we find them as mistress-figures, bulging out of black plastic bikinis and high boots while they throw the little chaps around.

This is not a work of art — nor does it intend to be — but as a collector’s item for anyone interested in dance, it’s an experience not to be missed. It’s at the Wycombe Swan on March 22, and the New Theatre, Oxford, on April 8.