glass of champagne before going on stage" then dance spontaneously. Dance writer Richard Shead appraised Les Biches as "a perfect synthesis of music, dance, and design..." He situated it in the aftermath of the radical experimentalism of her brother Vaslav Nijinsky, whose innovations had challenged the classical ballet canons: The great strength of Nijinska's choreography was its inventiveness, together with the fact that it remained essentially classical. It is easier to see now than it can have been in the 1920s that the future of choreography lay in classicism but in a classicism which was capable of being extended, varied, distorted even, without departing in any fundamental sense from the mainstream vocabulary of classical dance. Nijinska achieved this in Les Biches; Balanchine was to do so latter ...Cf. Baer (1986), p. 38 re Les Biches: "indefinable atmosphere and aura of elegance and play results from the ballet's synthesis of choreography, music, costumes, and decor"; "one of the first neoclassical ballets". Following World War I, Diaghilev found it advisable to produce a French-themed work neo-classical in style. Yet the Nijinska's dance vocabulary of Les Biches is not entirely academic; it blends virtuosic classroom steps, exposed lines and pointe work with body building poses, sporting images and references to popular dance forms. In this regard, Les Biches is "the fountainhead of neoclassicism in dance." According to Irina Nijinska, the choreographer's daughter, the famous gesture of La Garçonne upon entering, with one hand held flattened to the side of her face, and the gesture of the female corps de ballet, with one hand raised while resting on an elbow, are both military salutes that Nijinska has abstracted through a technique like Cubism. In Les Biches, writes Lynn Garafola, Nijinska's choreography "cracked open the gender codes of classical style, transforming a piece of twenties chic into a critique of sexual mores." According to Robert Johnson, "loves of various kinds are portrayed and accepted here seeingly without prejudice." Nijinska has turned the tables, making the ballet's three male athletes the object of a libidinous female gaze. "Nijinska has seized the power to frame the discussion about sex." Marie Laurencin's decor, according to Garafola, had "the same ambiguous blend of innocence and corruption" as the ballet. It opens in a flood of pink light that is "voluptuously feminine". A host of taboos are explored: "narcissism, voyeurism, female sexual power, castration, sapphism". Garafola a few pages earlier