That solo dancer leaping and twirling across a bare stage is Guillaume Côté, a principal dancer with the National Ballet of Canada. He put his own money and lots of fund-raising effort into creating the two-minute video, which captures the pure physicality of classical dance at its finest.

Côté is used to making ballet look easy on stage, in works such as Sleeping Beauty and The Seagull, but he says he has long wanted to portray a dancer in "the zone" -- the mental space he or she must find before a performance to let the art shine through.

"I wanted to get the tights off and I wanted to get the costumes off, and just show the sheer physicality of classical dance," he said in an interview with CBC's Metro Morning.

Those prolonged jumps, captured with a high-definition, high-speed Phantom camera, are what Côté feels like as he dances, he says.

Directed by Ben Shirinian and created for Bravo!FACT (Foundation to Assist Canadian Talent), the video was also conceived as a way of showing the athleticism involved in dance and an attempt to make ballet accessible to those who may believe they don't like it.

It appears to be working, since Côté's video has already scored more than 320,000 hits.