ORI NICHOL created the choreography for 11 different programs skated during the Winter Olympics. But few people watching ever heard her name � except when Jamie Sal� and David Pelletier, the Canadian pairs skaters with whom she works, made headlines after they were involved in a dispute that resulted in their sharing a gold medal with a Russian pair.

Though she is one of the world's leading figure- skating choreographers, Ms. Nichol is rarely acknowledged in the way choreographers working with dancers often take for granted. She is well-known within the insular world of skating, whose devotees conduct lively online debates about "who is the best choreographer?" But even at a time when there are so many showcases for figure-skating choreography � in addition to amateur and professional competitions, there are frequent television specials, touring shows and nonprofit skating troupes that operate much like dance companies � not much attention is paid to those behind the moves.

Choreographers are making important contributions to skating, extending the possibilities of movement on ice and helping skaters go beyond the tried and true, creating programs that have the visual impact, the pacing and the interaction with the music of a well- choreographed dance. Top choreographers like Ms. Nichol, Sarah Kawahara, Lea Ann Miller and the former ice dancers Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean help skaters to focus more on subtle points like body line and details of skating edges. Such attentiveness can enhance the artistic impression they make with judges, thereby earning amateur skaters higher scores for their performances.

Choreographers who work with amateur skaters face somewhat different challenges than those working with professionals. In amateur competitions like the Olympics, choreographers are bound by technical requirements involving jumps and lifts. Those hired by professionals have more freedom to innovate, keeping in mind the need to appeal to a mass audience. The choreographic team for the touring show Stars on Ice, made up of Sandra Bezic and Michael Siebert, in collaboration with Mr. Dean and Ms. Torvill, has an unusual advantage even among professionals. Unlike most choreographers who spend perhaps a week with skaters, the Stars on Ice team has five weeks to rehearse its new productions each year. This time allows them to create ensemble pieces with musical or dramatic themes for the show's 12-member casts. Their productions have primed audiences to expect more than the isolated triple jump from performers.

Ms. Miller, 41, a former Olympic pairs skater, was a charter member of the John Curry Skating Company, a kind of repertory group that in the mid-80's was a pioneer in the field of skating choregraphy. Directed by Curry, the 1976 gold medalist who died in 1994 and is generally considered to have set the standard for elegance and refinement in skating, it presented works by dance choreographers in places like the Metropolitan Opera House.

In the Chinese pair Xue Shen and Hongbo Zhao, Ms. Miller says, she found skaters who were highly skilled technically but whose performances suffered aesthetically. Since Olympic skaters receive separate scores in each area, Ms. Miller worked intensely with the pair to choreograph programs that enhanced their artistic presentation. "One of my concerns working with amateur skaters is that they're not always willing to give a new idea or choreography a try," Ms. Miller said during a recent interview. "You can give them as much as you're capable of, but it's up to them to understand it, feel it and perform it. Shen and Zao have the technical ability, but would they be willing to sacrifice some time on that and put it into the choreography? They seemed very open and willing."

Ms. Miller traveled to Beijing, where she and the ice dancers Ren�e Roca and Gorsha Sur worked with the Chinese pair. Ms. Miller also arranged to bring them to New York, where she took them to see the Paul Taylor Dance Company perform and "42nd Street," their first Broadway show. "They train in Beijing by themselves, with mostly male coaches who focus on the technical side," Ms. Miller said. "They were never given the opportunity to be exposed to everything that their competitors were."

For the skaters' long program at the Olympics, Ms. Miller chose the "Violin Fantasy on Puccini's `Turnadot' " because they were familiar with the opera's music and its characters. Skating with newfound expressiveness and fluidity, the pair won the bronze medal.

The idea of hiring a choreographer was largely unheard of for skaters of Ms. Miller's generation. Their coaches usually were the choreographers. "We never hired a choreographer until our second year as professionals," said Mr. Siebert, who competed at the 1984 Olympics in ice dancing with Judy Blumberg. "This is a new idea in skating, to have a separate choreographer."

Ms. Nichol, 38, who worked as a coach after she retired from skating, had her breakthrough as a choreographer helping Michelle Kwan to create musically sophisticated programs that balanced elegance and sensuality. "I had a clear vision of what I wanted women to look like on the ice," Ms. Nichol said, speaking from her home in Toronto. "Phrasing is a huge issue with me. I needed Michelle to understand rhythm and phrasing, body line and edge quality." (In Salt Lake City, Ms. Kwan skated a short program choreographed by Ms. Nichol in 1998 and a new long program by Ms. Kawahara.)

Also an alumna of the Curry company, Ms. Nichol draws inspiration from dance performances and encourages the skaters with whom she works to take dance classes and see performances. Even before the Olympics, Ms. Nichol said, Ms. Sal� and Mr. Pelletier, for whom she has choreographed since 1999, had "started going into the ballet studio, looking at what they can become next year and in the future."

"We are ready to go in a completely different direction, and they are excited by that idea," she added.

Ms. Nichol also hopes to collaborate with Nathan Birch and Tim Murphy, colleagues from the Curry company who now direct and choreograph The Next Ice Age, a Baltimore-based artistic skating company that has performed at the Kennedy Center in Washington and the American Dance Festival in Durham, N.C. Some see the influence of dance on skating as potentially problematic. A choreographer with a skating background has the advantage of "an understanding of your body position in relationship to edge position," said Ms. Kawahara from Salt Lake City, where she was choreographing the ice segments for the Olympic opening and closing ceremonies. "Dance choreographers have definitely made their mark with some skaters, but in some instances the movement tends to be a little bit static," she continued. "To me, it's the transitions from movement to movement that make skating. It's built out of transitions, because you're in constant movement."

David Liu, who attended the School of American Ballet and who choreographs and performs with Ice Theater of New York, finds there can also be benefits. "If you're a dance choreographer and don't know anything about skating, you have the advantage that you don't have any preconceived ideas about what skating should be like," he said by phone from Hong Kong, after a choreography assignment in Malaysia. "If you have a group of skaters who are open to that, you can come up with something wonderful. In dance, the nice thing is that you just let your imagination go. With skating, the mentality is often still limited to a certain set of standards and rules."

Mr. Dean consistently creates skating pieces � for Stars on Ice as well as individual skaters � that defy the notion of skating as a limited form. "I think anybody who understands how the body moves can work with skaters," he said by phone from Colorado, where he lives. "Sometimes they don't understand how the energy transfers and how you have to create the momentum, but they can get over that."

But the biggest limitation facing choreographers in today's fast- paced world of skating is time. Mr. Dean said he typically had about five days to create a program. He recalled, with a laugh how, he and Ms. Torvill worked during their skating careers. "We'd spend six weeks putting something together, by trial and error," he said. "We had the luxury of time. Since we finished competing, there's always a time constraint."  

Susan Reiter's most recent article for Arts & Leisure was about the dancers of Garth Fagan Dance.