The Bolshoi Ballet has been delighting Brisbane crowds with its production of Spartacus. It’s a big, bombastic, old-fashioned work that tells its epic story in broad strokes with dashes of kitsch woven into the choreography, but audiences have lapped it up.

Diamonds with Alyova Kovalyova and Jacopo Tissi in the centre. Photograph © Darren Thomas

Last night, the company opened the second production in its QPAC season – Jewels, which George Balanchine created for New York City Ballet in 1967 (a year before Yuri Grigorovich made Spartacus). It’s a wildly different, sumptuously beautiful work, and what a joy it is! The dancers sparkle with the same gleaming beauty as the gem stones that Balanchine references.

Consisting of three short works, inspired by jewelry that Balanchine saw at Van Cleef & Arpels, Jewels quickly became known as the first full-length abstract ballet. Drawing on a different gem, composer and dance style for each act, the neo-classical piece references Balanchine’s own career: Russia where he was born and trained as a dancer, France where he tasted early success with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, and America, where he lived from 1933, and where he founded the New...