This crimson drug trip nicely foreshadowed the blood-red nightmare of Ratmansky’s bold “Firebird,” which I’d never seen before. Brad Fields also lit this spooky environ, replete with hulking charcoal trees with red-tipped witch fingers instead of branches, by Simon Pastukh, and hallucinatory projections by Wendall K. Harrington. As in “Neo,” there was a lot going on. Instead of one firebird, Ratmansky had a flock of seventeen—both male and female—upping the red body count to 20 for the night. They wore Galina Solovyeva’s shiny ruby unitards with massive feather bustles and headdresses. Their leader was the real-life redhead Catherine Hurlin, who blazed tirelessly through her every athletic entrance. (In a “Giselle”-like twist, this Firebird dances everyone “until they collapse from exhaustion.”) 

Onto this pack of avian Fraggles stumbled Daniel Camargo, as the hero Ivan, though he got to their hellscape through a plain doorway in a bare room. He was clad in white satin, the perfect foil to Cory Stearns, as the evil sorcerer Katschei, who sported all black below the neck. On his head he wore a green bride-of Frankenstein wig with black lightning zigzags, which broadcast his puppet-master ties to a harem of captive maidens in matching green harlot wigs and gowns. Sunmi Park, as Ivan’s lost love, led these inmates, engaging in comically exaggerated and grotesque mime with Ivan as he tried to simultaneously woo and rescue her.  

The prisoners’ choreography was often clownish and frantic, including a heel dig step with wheelie arms. Another refrain was a hunched walk with speedskater port de bras. The maidens also performed fast, turned-in pirouettes and skitters on pointe, as well as panting, obedient bunny hops after their evil master. They made a few Busby Berkeley tableaux around him in adoration. It was all a bit icky, as when Kaschei discovered Ivan’s intrusion into his haunted milieu when he kissed Park and her mouth tasted like someone else. This meant, of course, that Ivan had kissed her despite her trancelike state. I don’t know how all this read back in 2012, but today, it sure evoked the specter of Jeffrey Epstein’s grooming and sexual enslavement of young women. Ratmansky, as ever, was ahead of his time.

But overall, this “Firebird” was psychologically rather than politically motivated. Freudian imagery was everywhere: from the beginning, when Ivan crossed the threshold of the unmarked door, to the euphoric ending in which the large cast donned virginal white nightgowns (like Clara/Marie in “The Nutcracker”) and passé jumped for joy in front of a firework display. Even the use of Stravinsky’s lovely Berceuse was emotionally fraught. Where Balanchine used this lullaby to glorify his ladybird savior, Ratmansky employed it as a slo-mo pas de quatre for his main cast—the Firebird, lead Maiden, Ivan, and Kaschei—as they jockeyed for power. At its end, Kaschei and the Maiden lay spooning together. Ivan and the Firebird were only able to break their sexual bond by smashing a giant egg that contained Kaschei’s soul, which was hidden deep inside one of the scary trees. Two more “Firebirds” are coming this spring: from the NYCB and the Dance Theatre of Harlem. But I have a feeling that ABT’s will easily win for most terrifying.