The Bolshoi's three-week summer season at Covent Garden ran into trouble in London. As well as (at best) mixed reviews, the company ran into someone at the Royal Opera House's programming department with a dark sense of humour. For its first two nights, Covent Garden's downstairs Linbury Studio Theatre was home to a show in such sharp contrast that it amounted to a rebellion in the basement. "Daimohk!" was performing - a troupe of child dancers from Chechnya, Russia's heart of darkness, where a decade-old separatist rebellion has been (officially) stifled, but a war waged by Russian soldiers still (unofficially) rages, and every child grows up with face-to-face knowledge of sudden, violent death.

Russians fear Chechens worse than fire. Russian armies have been trying for hundreds of years to crush the Chechens' defiant sense of self. Russian children grow up learning Lermontov's 19th-century poem about the "evil Chechen" creeping along the riverbank, dagger between teeth, coming to stab the innocent. That fear never wears off. Today's war has left the region in ruins. Yet it gets hardly any press in Russia, and the plight of innocent civilians, caught between separatist and colonial violence, is glossed over by the government in Moscow. For anyone, like me, whose experience of Chechnya has been limited to wartime - and has featured, among other things, a lot of sad men in shabby coats standing in the rubble of buildings bombed to kingdom come by the Russians, saying, "they specially targeted this university/theatre/concert hall/library because it represented our culture" - this night of triumphant Chechen artistry could only have been a delight.

The children, some as young as eight, were wonderful dancers - no small achievement when you think they practise all winter in unheated sports halls. The dances were an expression of their resilient warrior culture. Tough dances: sword fights in which real sparks flew, and jumps and acrobatics that would terrify any faint-hearted foe (an irony considering that some of these boys will almost certainly die at the hands of hostile soldiery). You couldn't guess which three children had been injured in May, when a separatist bomb went off in Grozny sports stadium before their performance, killing the local president. They were as poised as professionals - not showing, except with radiant smiles, that performing at Covent Garden was a dream come true.

I was invited by Louis Greig, a financier with a thing about Chechnya who seemed to have asked half the City along too to drum up funds. Trained by Ramzan, a Chechen thesp in pinstripes, and sent on European tours by Chris Hunter, a blond English Quaker, the dancers have already raised enough money for a second-hand tour bus and are now collecting to build a dance hall. After the performance, Chris gave Ramzan a brick wrapped in gold ribbon: the foundation stone. Another dream coming true, Ramzan said: "Now I really believe the hall will be built."

Most of the dreams of people at war - of a way out, a protector, or a way back, depending where you are in the cycle of death - don't work out. Chechens whose ancestors escaped the wars of last century, and settled in Jordan or Turkey, still keep mementoes of their lost homeland and talk longingly - if unrealistically -- about returning some day. The dreams of many people watching this event were more desperate, but equally unlikely to become reality. Akhmed Zakayev, Chechnya's most sophisticated separatist, an actor-turned-culture-minister-turned-foreign-envoy who has won asylum here (with help from Vanessa Redgrave and the exiled Russian billionaire, Boris Berezovsky), was in the audience. His hope is to make people in Britain recognise Chechens as unlike Russia's caricature of a million bloodthirsty Islamist terrorists.

Outside the opera house was a young Chechen called Arsan. His dream was to persuade journalists to save his teenage friend, a 15-year-old war victim with no eyes or arms, who has been refused asylum. "He's can't even register with a GP," Arsan said unhappily. "He's starving in his room. Can you do something?"

There was a party for the dancers at Louis Greig's house before the bus took them back to Grozny. I couldn't go, but a friend who was there described it to me. A hint of a still more extraordinary dream - the stuff of fairy-tales - began to emerge.

A young man called Alex was at the party. He spoke no Chechen or Russian, but his ancestors had been wealthy Chechens with oil interests before they escaped the Russian Revolution in 1917 and fled to Paris. "I'd never even heard his name," said my friend, who has spent more time with Chechens than most. "But everyone there gathered round him as though he was a king. I've never seen such reverence."

There's never been a king of Chechnya. So I wouldn't have given it another thought, except that a couple of nights ago I heard another side of the same story. A woman at a dinner told me she'd made friends with an Englishman in the film business. He was called Alexei, and he'd described being invited to the Chechen dancers' party. His ancestors came from Chechnya, he said, but he knew very little about it. "But he got to the party and everybody started treating him like royalty. They were even saying he should go home to Chechnya," she said. "He was completely blown away."

I don't think this dream could come true either. It's so much an escape from the grinding horror of Chechen reality: a wisp of bright fantasy. But there's something encouraging, at least, about people with so few grounds for hope obstinately carrying on dreaming - even if Alex would rather be king of Hollywood than of Chechnya.

E-mail vanora@timesonline.co.uk