Dance Theatre of Harlem’s Firebird (I mean the bird, not the ballet) lit up the 1984 American Olympics and took momentary command of the Kremlin in 1988, just before the Soviet Union crumbled. It was as if this untamed creature who only wanted to fly free were suddenly an emblem of American reach and power—a bald eagle. Yet the Renaissance man Geoffrey Holder paints her in the shades of his native Trinidad. She blazes across the stage in dazzling purple and blood orange. On a backdrop of dense tropical green, dusky pink flowers bend their enormous heads protectively over the staccato and finely faceted choreography of the Balanchinean John Taras. “Geoffrey Holder’s sense of color lends itself to fantasy,” the troupe’s founding director, Arthur Mitchell, told PBS at the Kennedy Center premiere, in 1983. The fantasy of this long-dormant version, as one of the original Harlem Firebirds put it, is that “every single bird is different” and they all belong. A fantasy indeed from the vantage of 2026 America—and a balm. The 50-minute one-act ballet serves as centerpiece for a rich mixed-repertory program, with live orchestra. —Apollinaire Scherr