tradition, has seasoned Nijinska. She presented her sober observations on folk society, yet also there lurked a vital vision. The heavy, collective mood of predestination is countered by hints of a peasant's wit and ability to survive. After first seeing it, H. G. Wells wrote: The ballet Les noces is "a rendering in sound and vision of the peasant soul, in its gravity, in its deliberate and simple-minded intricacy, in its subtly varied rhythms, in its deep undercurrents of excitement..." Stravinsky's idea for the score evolved during war, revolution, and exile. His libretto conveys ancient and set patterns, yet his music uses staccato rhythms and a vocal overlay of upheaval. Left little expressed is the wedding as a reassuring ritual of joy. The tone of the work is darker, more anxious, conjuring a "deeply moving evocation" of the ceremony. Nijinska translated it to dance, embodying in the ballet a tragic sense, the fate of both tradition and revolution. The lyrics were taken from a collection of Russian folk songs (the Sobranniye Piesni of Kireievsky), although Stravinsky's libretto is arranged in an unorthodox manner. The phrases were selected for their "typicality" or commonality. Stravinsky told his friend the conductor Robert Craft that his text for Les noces "might be compared to one of those scenes in Ulysses in which the reader seems to be overhearing scraps of conversation without the connecting thread of discourse." The voices of the singers seem disconnected from the characters they represent. "Stravinsky's composition, while fluid and layered, at times becomes overtly jarring." In form a cantata, the "music accompanying his choral and solo singers came from an orchestra of percussion, dominated by four pianos." Dance writer Robert Johnson claimed that Stravinsky's text for Les noces manifests his interest in psychology and a collective unconscious of the type posited by Carl Jung. Accordingly, the contrast between a musical "cell" and its elaboration in the score for Les noces represents a dialog between profane time (chronos) and sacred time (kairos), as defined by Mircea Eliade. Nevertheless, Stravinsky described his conception of the ballet's mise-en-scène as a "masquerade" or "divertissement.," whose effect would be comic. Nijinska rejected this concept, and it is her somber vision of the ballet that ultimately prevailed. The minimalist visual designs, both the costumes and the sets, were by Natalia Goncharova, the color scheme being "earthen gold, blue-grey, and black." Yet "the fanciful, colorful costumes