Saphires Ballet Delights Audience at Bank of America Plaza

American Contemporary Ballet (ACB) performed the world premiere called "Sapphires," a ballet that is spearheaded by ACB's founder and choreographer Lincoln Jones.

In 1967, George Balanchine created a plotless ballet titled "Jewels," but never staged its fourth act which is "Sapphires." It is danced to the music of Arnold Schoenberg's "Suite for Strings in G Major" with a live sixteen-piece orchestra, all accomplished classical musicians. This is a special composition for Schoenberg because he composed it in 1934, the first piece he wrote in America after fleeing the Nazi regime in Germany.

ACB utilized an intimate 100-seat setting in a suite at Bank of America Plaza in downtown Los Angeles. So the audience members got to be up close and personal with the dancers, a very unique and effective performance space with brilliant blue lighting design. And some of the costumes were designed in line with the talented Barbara Karinska's original concepts, some of the most gorgeous ever designed for a ballet.

Jones was successful in showcasing the beauty of the dancers wearing dreamy blue costumes softly lit by the blue lighting while the dancers bourreed across the dance floor. At times there were four dancers on stage, and then eight more would join them, and then there were also duets. All the while dancing in amazing simultaneous harmony.

At the end of the evening, one felt the same as Jones envisioned it - "an opportunity to walk through a choreographic dreamworld and see what the dream looks like when it turns blue."

It was a phantasmagorical journey.