In the air.

No one should have any problem spotting Michael Trusnovec when he performs with the Paul Taylor Dance Company. Along with being the only strawberry blond onstage, 29-year-old Trusnovec possesses the soaring leaps and hang time of a ballet dancer, sustains the sense of earthbound power essential to the modern repertoire, and maintains musical continuity at all times.

An actor could also admire Trusnovec's magnetic ability to attract attention with seemingly little effort. His touching pantomime of blindness in Taylor's Arabesque was Iris own creation. ("Paul will trust ns to work out some moments on our own," Trusnovec says. "If he likes it, it stays.") With a waste-less command of gesture and an unerring sense of timing, he can embody radiant innocence, icy menace, or blissfully sublime goofiness--a typical repertoire for a Taylor dancer. This March he opens the company's season at Manhattan's City Center as the male lead in Taylor's awesome masterpiece set to Bach, Promethean Fire.

Unlike most little boys who study dance, Trusnovec did not follow an older sister to dance class at age 6. Instead he followed a female playmate--to Legworks, a studio on Long Island, where he grew up. "I sat out in the hall to watch until the teacher invited me to join," he recalls.

After study at the June Claire School of Dance in Patchogue and at the Board of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES) Cultural Arts Center in Syosset, an arts magnet high school, he had no doubt that dance was his life's work.

"At the time I was focused on show business," he says. "I'd seen Jerome Robbins' Broadway, and I had an aunt who would give me videocassettes of Fred Astaire movies."

Fortunately for him and his present admirers, Trusnovec was also compiling such an excellent academic record in high school that he was named a Presidential Scholar in the Arts. That achievement brought him to the attention of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, which offered him a scholarship. Not ready to plunge into the gypsy life on the Great White Way, and frankly eager to get away from New York City, he accepted.

Readers are cautioned that at this point young Michael's arrival in the Lone Star state does not provide the sort of conflict found in some recent movies about ballet (and nowhere else). Despite much probing, his SMU professors could not recall any dramatic vignettes about a raw teenager overcoming unfamiliar challenges through heroic effort at the last minute. In fact, they don't recall anything raw about him at all.

"Michael was open to everything and very positive about laying something new," says Nathan Montoya. "The only major correction I remember giving him was about his habit of looking down while in class--'bedroom eyes,' I called it. He got my point."

Patricia Delaney says that Trusnovec was an unusually bright and mature student: "He was always prepared, always on time. Most students don't respond to the intellectual discipline of studying Labanotation, for instance, but Michael welcomed it."

And Robert Beard, now retired, recalls introducing Trusnovec to Martha Graham s Diversion of Angels. He was understandably confused at first but quickly responded to the freedom of it," Beard says. "Michael was a self-starter, very objective about what needed to be done and his ability to do it."

SMU also provided an authentic introduction to Bob Fosse when guest professor Ann Reinking used him in a suite of Fosse's jazz dances.

Just as he credits a little girl chum with getting him interested in dance in the first place, Trusnovec credits SMU student Annmaria Mazzini with fanning his interest in Paul Taylor. He danced his first major Taylor work as a student in 1995, when he performed Esplanade. Mazzini urged him to join her in an audition for Taylor 2, the junior company; not only were both hired, but both eventually also joined the main troupe, Trusnovec made his company debut in 1998; Mazzini's followed the next year to solidify what had been a gradual remaking of the Taylor style, The other excellent dancers who joined the company around that time--Silvia Nevjinsky, Orion Duckstein, Julie Tice, and Robert Kleinendorst--may lack the floor-hugging impact of their predecessors, but their ability to look more at home in the air has brought a new lightness to Taylor's work.

At 5'10" and 160 pounds, Trusnovec is no double for a hunky predecessor such as David Parsons, but he rose--some might say soared--to the challenge of dancing Parsons's great frenetic solo in Last Look (1985) in his own way in 2003. While triumphing in this darkling spectacle of aftershock, done to Donald York's anguished score, he also achieved an opposite triumph in 2002's Dream Girls, performed to recordings of the barbershop quartet file Buffalo Bills.

"I'm the dreamy one of the four guys in long johns and clunky workboots," Trusnovec says. "Paul didn't tell me to be dreamy, but I look upon my character that way, and he hasn't objected. I've made the guy more goofy, and that's been accepted too."

Taylor's New York City premieres are Le Grand Puppetier, a variant of the Fokine/Stravinsky Petrouchka, and In the Beginning. Although Trusnovec has understudied two roles in the latter, he is not cast for any of its performances in NY, though he will be in the 50-state tour. If having some downtime makes him antsy, however, he can always assist in Labanotating these novelties.

Harris Green, a freelance writer, is a former features editor at DANCE MAGAZINE.