[The Doll] (or La Tabatière), and Autumn Song. These creations were for her solo performances at the Narodny Dom Theatre. She was twenty-five. The 1915 program described her as "the celebrated prima ballerina-artist of the State Ballet". The music for her dance creation Autumn Song was by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and for The Doll by Anatoly Liadov. On that program, performed at the Narodny Dom [People's House], were also ballets choreographed by Michel Fokine of Ballets Russes, to be danced by Nijinska and her husband. Her choreography for Autumn Song, "the more important" of her two solos, "owed a debt to Fokine". Kiev 1915–1921, her 'Ecole de Mouvement' In August 1915, the family moved to Kiev. Nijinska's husband 'Sasha' Kochtovsky became ballet master at the State Opera Theater. There they both worked on ballet scenes for the operas, and on staging dance divertissements and ballets. In 1917 Nijinska began teaching at several institutions: the State Conservatory of Music, the Central State Ballet Studio, the Yiddish Cultural Center Drama Studio, and the Ukrainian Drama School. In 1919, after their son Leon was born, after her School of Movement was opened, her husband Sasha left the family and traveled alone to Odessa. Treatise on choreography Nijinska's "theoretical speculations" about modern ballet apparently began to crystallize. During a short stay in Moscow after the 1917 October Revolution, Nijinska started her treatise: The School of Movement (Theory of Choreography). It was published in 1920 but has become lost to posterity, like much of the dance materials she created in Kiev. The only remnant of it apparently is a 100-page 'manuscript' found "scrawled" in one of her exercise books. In a short essay published in 1930, however, she apparently recapitulated her key ideas: "On movement and the school of movement". Nijinska writes: N. V. N. Baer observes an imbedded neoclassical implication within Nijinska's then radical theory of dance, 'the school of movement', i.e., not the overthrow of balletic tradition leading to modern dance, but the incorporation nonetheless of entirely new modes of movement. "It is in this essay that she documents her search for a new means of expression based on the extension of the classical vocabulary of dance steps." Collaboration with designer Exter In 1917 Nijinska met the visual artist Alexandra Exter (1882-1949) in Moskva. Exter's cutting-edge designs employed constructivist ideas. The two traded their views on modern art and the theater. So began