her face on the top and rests her head despondently in her hands. We see both the individuals (those faces) and their submission to authority and the group ... Dance critic Janice Berman writes that Nijinska viewed the wedding celebration from her perspective as a woman: "Nijinska was obviously a feminist; the solemnity of the nuptials derives not only from the sanctity of married love, but from its downside---a loss of freedom, particularly for the bride. She loses not only her long, long braids, but also her privacy, her right to dream. The bride's last reverie, after all, comes before the ceremony; she leans her head on her hands, atop a table formed by eight of her friends. After the nuptials,another dreamer takes the bride's place." Also, the critic Johnson points out that Les noces is filled with images of dreamers. "Les noces was Nijinska's answer to The Rite," a creative continuation of her brother's work, here "a reenactment of a Russian peasant wedding." The ballet movement of the ceremony reflected "not a joyous occasion but a foreboding social ritual." Dance critic André Levinson in his harsh 1923 review called her choreography "Marxist" in which the individual was swallowed up by the masses. Nijinska, however, escaped from her brother's nihilism by following Stravinsky's lead "through the formal beauty and discipline of the Orthodox liturgy." Nonetheless the ballet remained "a modern tragedy, a complicated and very Russian drama that celebrated authority" yet showed its "brutal effect on the lives of individuals." Dance academic and critic Lynn Garafola, in discussing the ballet scene in the early 1920s, identifies a major competitor to Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. She characterizes Ballets suédois (Swedish ballet) led by Rolf de Maré as a company that had "largely succeeded in edging Diaghilev to the sidelines of avant-garde Paris." Yet Garafola mentions her admiration for the 1922 ballet Le Renard (see above) created by Nijinska for Ballets Russes. She continues: [I]t was only in 1923 that Diaghilev staged a modernist masterpiece that transcended the best of his rival's offerings. Les noces, probably the greatest dance work of the decade, teamed three of his closest Russian collaborators: Stravinsky, his 'first son', as composer; Natalia Goncharova, as designer; and Bronislava Nijinska, as choreographer. "Bronislava Nijinska's Les noces [grew] out of boldness of conception without regard for precedent or consequences," wrote John Martin, dance critic for The New York Times. Nijinska herself