she first proposed struck Nijinska as wrong". Then Goncharova modified her designs to resemble the style of clothes worn by dancers to rehearsals. Balanchine's practical dance clothes for performances "can trace precedents back to Noces." In the end, Goncharova's sparse sets and costume design are now "inseparable from the ballet's musical and movement elements." When Nijinska worked on Les noces: I was still breathing the air of Russia, a Russia throbbing with excitement and intense feeling. All the vivid images of the harsh realities of the Revolution were still part of me and filled my whole being. Nijinska researched ethnological studies of peasant customs in Russia. Yet in boldly translating to the ballet stage, she seems mostly to follow Stravinsky's modern score. She directed the women to dance en pointe, in order to elongate their silhouettes and resemble Russian icons. The beating sounds of the pointes jabbing the board demonstrates strength (not the ethereal effect previously associated with en pointe). Nijinska's groupings of women move largely in unison. The corps often faces square to the audience, a departure from the "epaulement" found in classical works, which softens the look by angling the shoulders. Toward the end of scene one, the women handle extremely long braids of the bride's hair, greatly exaggerated in thickness, as if the women were "sailors taking up the mooring lines of a boat." The whole piece, tethered to an ancient folk tradition, has an overwhelming sense of a controlled conformity. Her choreography reflected Nijinska's interest in modernist abstraction. Corporeal forms like the "cart" that takes the Bride from her parental home, and the "cathedral" grouping at the ballet's end, have been abstracted, as also such gestures as the braiding of hair, and the sobbing. The appearance of pyramidal and triangular structures that represent "spiritual striving" furthers this interest in abstraction. It may show the influence of painter Wassily Kandinsky. He had presented the so-called "Program for the Institute of Artistic Culture," his proposed master plan for the arts, including dance, in Moscow in June 1920. An iconic pose from Les noces has the heads of the women dancers, i.e., the bridesmaids, as if stacked up. Author Jennifer Homans, in defining the ballet's tragedy, comments: In one of the ballet's most poignant and telling images, the women dutifully pile their faces like bricks on top of one another, forming an abstract, pyramid structure ... The bride sets