'danced operetta'. Darius Milhaud composed the music, with the ballet libretto by Jean Cocteau, poet and filmmaker. The dancers' wardrobe were designed by 'Coco' Chanel; it included "bathing costumes of the period". The scenery was by sculptor Henri Laurens. The cast of players: a handsome kid (Anton Dolin), a bathing belle (Lydia Sokolova), a golfer (Leon Woizikowski), and a tennis player (Nijinska). The Cocteau libretto has a thin plot. Its title refers to the actual Train Bleu, whose destination was Côte d'Azur, a fashionable resort area, specifically Monte Carlo. "The Blue Train used to bring the beau monde down to the south from Paris..." Diaghilev remarked, "The first point about Le train bleu is that there is no Blue Train in it." The scenario "took place on a beach, where pleasure-seekers disported themselves." Inspired in part by youth "showing off" with "acrobatic stunts", the ballet "was a smart piece about a fashionable plage" [beach]. Nijinska created a special ambiance through the language of dance, she introduced angular and geometrical movements and organized dancers on stage as interactive groups, that alluded to images of sports activities, such as golf, tennis and recreational games on a beach. Popular passion for sport caused Cocteau to first conceive of a 'beach ballet'. The work also provided a prize role for the athletic Anton Dolin, whose "acrobatics astonished and delighted the audience." When he left the company, however, no one as capable could be found for the role, causing the ballet to be dropped. Probably the ballet suffered when collaboration between Nijinska and librettist Cocteau collapsed. Garafola writes that contested issues included: (a) gender, Cocteau was said to entertain a "dim view of women" versus Nijinska's unease with traditional femininity; (b) Cocteau's story and gesture approach verses 'abstract ballet' (Cocteau favored substituting out dance for pantomime, but Nijinska was satisfied with a plotless ballet); and, (c) the changing aesthetics of dance (Cocteau's wholesale preference for acrobatics over dance, but which for Nijinska constituted a series of delicate judgments). Last minute changes were made. Nijinska's choreography managed to present for the audience a sophisticated view of the beach ballet. Garafola suggests that here "Only Nijinska had the technical wherewithal ... to wrest irony from the language and traditions of [classical dance]." Le train bleu anticipated the 1933 ballet Beach. "Massine's choreography, like Nijinska's, was a stylization of sport motifs and different dance idioms within a structured