INCORRECT HEADLINE — The World Famous Lipizzaner Stallions performed at the Colisee on Thursday. An earlier version of this headline on the Web and on Friday’s A1 was incorrectly reported.

LEWISTON – When the music swells and the lights go up, these horses know their cues.

Like shy actors, the “World Famous Lipizzaner Stallions” are quiet until they reach the performance area. There, the great, white horses shed their docile manner.

“They can be explosive,” head rider Victor Pozzo said Thursday afternoon, hours before the company put on a show at the city-owned Colisee.

“They enjoy it even more than we do,” Pozzo said, describing the technical moves that have made the horses legendary in the equine world.

The horses are trained for dressage and a series of maneuvers that the show labeled “airs above the ground.”

The work includes fancy dance-like steps and grand moves that bring the horses on two legs and leaping through the air.

“They were bred to do it for the last 300 years,” Pozzo said. Part of that is strength. But there’s something else, too.

“This is a breed of horse that really, really likes to please,” he said. “When they’re called on to perform, they have great reserves of energy.

“And they like to have a little fun, themselves,” Pozzo said.

Every night, when he gets in costume and climbs aboard the horses, he feels it. Pozzo, who stands about 5 feet, 9 inches tall and is built lean, looks small beside the muscled horses. The air work is particularly exciting.

“It’s a lot like a roller coaster ride,” he said. “There’s that sensation in the pit of your stomach when the horse raises off the ground. You get a moment of weightlessness.

“It’s an extraordinary feeling to be able to harness the power of the animal,” said Pozzo, who, like the horses, was raised to do this.

The 30-year-old Californian with 25 years of riding experience took over as head rider of the traveling company six months ago. Before that, he worked as a trainer at the horses’ home in Ovedo, Fla., a suburb of Orlando.

He grew up riding in Los Angeles. In his 20s, he worked for another horse performance company. In 2005, he joined White Stallion Productions, which has been traveling the U.S. and Canada with Lipizzaners and Andalusians for 37 years.

The company’s aim is to bring dressage and the leaping maneuvers to folks who could never go to the Spanish Riding School in Vienna, the Lipizzaners’ home, to see them.

“We do this for a paycheck, but we do it more to bring it to hundreds of people who wouldn’t have the opportunity to see them in real life,” he said.

The company travels with 10 riders, including Pozzo, four groomers and a dozen horses. Two are Andalusians. The rest are Lipizzaners.

They work as ambassadors for the dance-like dressage.

“I think this aspect of horsemanship is disappearing, especially in the United States,” he said.

“You see less and less people doing it for the art form and more doing for the competition, for the bragging rights or the money they could win,” he said.

He does it for the simple exchange between horse and rider.

“There’s a sense of harmony,” he said. “It’s like ballet.”