Edward Villella, legendary star of the New York City Ballet, conducts a class each day for his company, the Miami City Ballet. (Linda Hervieux for News)

PARIS — Edward Villella threads his way through 50 lithe bodies stretching, bending, twisting and spinning through a midday warmup. There will be seven more hours of dancing before the curtain falls late Wednesday night.

Suddenly, Villella taps a beat, beat, beat on the scuffed stage, his taut compact frame bouncing up and down as if seized by inspiration, sending the dancers into peals of laughter.

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Villella grins. He was one of the world's biggest stars when he danced with the New York City Ballet, taking his cues from his mentor, George Balanchine. But here on stage in Paris, he is simply a beloved teacher leading a class.

Just shy of 75, and looking a dozen years younger with floppy dark hair, Villella still resembles the scrappy street kid from Bayside who wore ballet tights under his baseball uniform.

Renowned for his athletic interpretation of ballet, Villella has brought that same influence to his company, the Miami City Ballet, which includes many fellow New Yorkers dancing the high-energy, contemporary works of Balanchine.

If New York ballet has a style, it is Balanchine. The legendary founder of the New York City Ballet created works for his favorite dancers, like Villella, whose ripped muscles and gravity-cheating leaps introduced terms such as "virile" into the ballet lexicon.

"We're New York-influenced," Villella said backstage in Paris, where his company is performing this month. "If you grew up in New York, you will always take that energy with you."

It is that spirit that Villella, an ex-welterweight prizefighter, exported south when he formed his own company in 1986 dedicated to Balanchine, but with a repertoire ranging from classics like "Swan Lake" to Jerome Robbins' "In the Night."

It was a slow climb for Villella, who was hard-pressed to lure top dancers trained at Balanchine's School of American Ballet at Lincoln Center, where he enrolled at age 10, much to the horror of his father, "who didn't want his son wearing tights."

"We were the fourth, fifth choice," Villella said of his rank in the American ballet world's pecking order. "We were unproven."

So Villella recruited dancers from around the world who he thought had the natural chops — if not the obvious technique — to learn the complicated moves he was determined to teach them.

"I spent the first six or seven years concentrating on the Balanchine, because it's the most complicated, the most difficult, musically the purest," he said.

And the New York-trained dancers who once shunned his little company began to arrive. One of them was Jennifer Kronenberg, who joined at age 17, fresh out of Balanchine's school.

It was a dream come true for the future prima ballerina, who spent her childhood in Kew Gardens hearing story after story about Villella.

"My ballet teacher used to always talk about Edward. How Edward was a working-class kid just like all of us, how masculine and exciting his dancing was," she said.

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The brutally competitive world of professional ballet depicted in the film "Black Swan" isn't far off the mark, some dancers say. Those dancers, however, don't dance for Villella.

"We have a nice reputation of being warm and friendly," said Kronenberg, 35, who has danced with the company the longest, since 1994. "It's really a family."

Villella's wife, Linda, runs the company's ballet school, and their daughter, Crista, is a ballet mistress who helps stage the productions.

Kronenberg, with soft blue eyes and delicate features, is married to dark-haired Carlos Miguel Guerra, a fellow dancer with whom she is often paired. The glamorous couple sizzled during the Paris run, particularly in the boozy, black-tie Twyla Tharp number, "Nine Sinatra Songs."

Queens native Jennifer JKronenberg, principal dancer of the Miami City Ballet, warms up before rehearsals. (Linda Hervieux for News)

The piece is one of 14 ballet selections that have wowed discerning Parisian audiences and critics during the company's first tour at the venerable Théâtre du Châtelet.

"The Miami City Ballet is dancing like the New York City Ballet was dancing under Balanchine. They're dancing a living Balanchine," said Valéry Colin, director of the Paris summer dance festival.

With the 10th anniversary of 9/11 approaching, one piece that has resonated, particularly among the half dozen New Yorkers in the company, is "Promethean Fire," an abstract piece written by Paul Taylor in 2002. Dancers clad in tight black velour bodysuits writhe and tumble, as if evoking the crumbling towers, only to rise again.

Soloist Amanda Weingarten Goodwin is dancing in the piece for the final time before she retires, at 24, and heads to Fordham University this fall. Eventually, she wants to become a lawyer fighting against human trafficking, a cause she discovered through her church.

Like most professional dancers, Goodwin was in kindergarten when she pulled on her first leotard. Goodwin, whose chocolate-drop eyes are reminiscent of Natalie Portman in "Black Swan," dreamed of becoming a dancer and studied at the School of American Ballet.

"It's been a really hard decision," Goodwin said of her choice to give up a plum spot in a top company that most young dancers can only dream of landing. During the Paris run, at least five aspiring dancers have auditioned each day.

For Villella, building a successful company is the logical culmination of everything he has accomplished in a long and rich career.

After retiring from the New York City Ballet in 1977 after his umpteenth injury — "nine broken toes, artificial hips, stress fractures in both legs, bad back, arthritis" — Villella set about pursuing other things. He produced TV specials, did some choreography, even appeared as himself in an episode of "The Odd Couple."

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Perhaps most impressively, he made a fan of his critical father, a truck driver who was humiliated when his son began hanging his ballet dainties to dry on the clothesline in their tiny backyard in Bayside.

It all began one day when Villella was knocked unconscious by a baseball, prompting his mother to ban him from the field and drag him along to his sister's ballet class. He liked the jumping and signed up. He was 7.

When Villella decided to seriously pursue dance, his father didn't speak to him for a full year. Then his parents came to see him onstage in New York.

"I got off stage left and I heard something and there were my mother and father in the wings in tears," he said.

Although his 75th birthday is looming on Oct. 1, Villella isn't thinking about retirement.

"There's a Balanchinian phrase I like to use," he said. "'I would like to die in the harness.' I'll work as long as I am productive.