Les Ballets Trockadero brings masculine grace — and a supertall "ballerina" — to Laugh Out Loud!

The ballerina, willowy and tragic, wafts through the final minute of the familiar Michel Fokine solo "The Dying Swan." She is a vision in white, though her tutu appears to be molting just a bit. She is graceful, fluid, a bit husky through the shoulders, and just short of 7 feet tall on pointe. She is, after all, a man.

She is Katarina Bychkova, of Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, otherwise known as Joshua Grant. And s/he is in town for the Laugh Out Loud! Spring Dance Festival at Pacific Northwest Ballet, a celebration of the lighter side of this usually very serious art form. Grant, a native of Georgia who was a member of PNB's corps de ballet from 2001-04, joined the all-male "Trocks" in 2006 and had his stage name bestowed on him by company director Tory Dobrin.

"I like to think that my name fits me perfectly," Grant said in a telephone interview last month. "I'm the tallest person in the company, so I have to have this air of extreme dignity. When you're the biggest person, you have to have that commanding presence about you. No matter what ballet [Katarina] does, she tries to be the best."

So, how does a regular ballet guy (Grant's also a veteran of the National Ballet of Canada) end up in a tutu? For Grant, it was an opportunity he couldn't refuse. He auditioned for the Ballets Trockadero with three weeks' notice — during which he had to learn pointe technique pretty much from scratch. "All the girls at the National were totally backing me up and trying to help me," he said. "I took company class on pointe, and every time I could get a correction I got a correction. It was pretty intense. It was scary at first, but you get over the fear."

As a Trock, Grant tours internationally for about 30 weeks a year, performing both as Katarina Bychkova and as Ashley Romanov-Titwillow, a male dancer who hails from south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Alas, Mr. Romanov-Titwillow is not scheduled to visit Seattle, but Ms. Bychkova, if appropriately coaxed, will perform "The Dying Swan" three times Saturday and Sunday in the festival. Grant will also be giving a pre-performance chat at McCaw Hall at 6 p.m. Sunday, before the 7 p.m. evening performance.

"The Dying Swan," Grant says, is a very difficult piece — "there's so much more to it than just bourrées for three and a half minutes." He tries to do it, he says, with as little laughter as possible. "[Katarina] is the queen bee, and she can't do anything wrong. She likes to not mess up too much. I try to keep an air of grace to it, even though she's falling all over the place. To me, it's such a spiritual experience to perform it. The music is some of the most beautiful music ever composed."

And if she does happen to mess up — watch out. You don't want to get in the way of a seven-foot swan.

Moira Macdonald: 206-464-2725 or mmacdonald@seattletimes.com