For Stravinsky, the fairy tale is not a realm of treacly sweetness but of gluey eeriness, like a dream on the cusp of nightmare. In The Firebird and Le Baiser de la fée (The Fairy’s Kiss), magic is often evil and never purely good. It’s where tempo, with its steady assurances, distends and the polarities of possibility and doom draw close. In two one-act story ballets, the Ukrainian exile Alexei Ratmansky responds to Stravinsky’s ambiguities with characters as nuanced as the relationships between them. The previous Princess in The Firebird is now one of a gaggle of green-haired girls infatuated by the cult leader Kaschei. Our girl distinguishes herself by botching the rules. She also doesn’t know what she wants, as the interloper Ivan soon discovers when he tries to woo her. All this comes out in Ratmansky’s precise, imaginative steps. As for the boy cursed by a fairy’s kiss, he loses the girl in exchange, the choreographer has noted, for “the land of art.” The Dutch National Ballet presents these one-acts on a brilliant double bill, the excellent company’s part in the annual Holland Festival. —Apollinaire Scherr