Defying Gravity: Jerome Barnes Story Of Dance, Determination And Destiny

Jerome Barnes is light on his feet. Ridiculously light.

I had witnessed the British dancers fleet-footedness a few days earlier, during the final dress rehearsal for Giselle , in which he dances the part of Albrecht, a philandering, lovestruck nobleman-in-disguise. In it, Barnes, who has been a dancer for almost 20 years, launched off the stage with that spritely, gravity-defying effortlessness that gives ballet audiences precisely that sense of flight we earthbound humans crave.

To help me better understand how a ballet dancer achieves this sensation of uplift, Barnes told me to think of a trampoline, imagine that feeling of effortless effort, as though being thrust into the air by an invisible force, momentarily escaping Earths pull.

Then, in the rehearsal studio at Cape Town City Ballets headquarters in Rondebosch, he stepped up onto a bench and dropped to the ground, only to instantly rebound, like a spring.

Ballet, he said, is about training the body to convey that spring-like reaction in a way that, by merely watching, we in the audience experience that anti-gravity sensation, which lifts us up, too.