The best dance shows in NYC this month

[Note: Queen of Hearts returns in February for an encore run, with Lindsay Rose in the title role.] Lewis Carroll's trippy Alice in Wonderland books have inspired many theatrical spectacles, but Company XIV's seductive Queen of Hearts is a singular sexcess: a transporting fusion of haute burlesque, circus, dance and song. Your fall down the glamorous rabbit hole begins upon entering the troupe's louche Bushwick lair, where scantily clad server-performers slink about in flattering red lighting. A cursory knowledge of the source material will help you make sense of the show’s three-act cavalcade of Alice-inspired routines, as our blue-haired heroine embarks on an NC-17 coming-of-age journey under the guidance of the White Rabbit. As usual, Company XIV impresario Austin McCormick has assembled an array of alluring and highly skilled artists, who look smashing in Zane Pihlstrom's lace-and-crystal-encrusted costumes. A contortionist emerges in an S/M-vinyl cocoon and transforms into a beauteous butterfly; mustachioed twins, as Tweedledum and Tweedledee, perform a cheeky spin on the Marx Brothers' mirror trick. As the title royal, voluptuous vocalist Storm Marrero rules over all in her stunning 11-o'clock number. With its soundtrack of pop songs, attractive ensemble cast and immersive aesthetics—plus chocolate and specialty cocktails—Queen of Hearts feels like Moulin Rouge! for actual bohemians. Hell, it even has a cancan. Like Alice, you may resist returning to reality when...

The annual Flamenco Festival returns to showcase a wide range of variations on the Spanish form at a dozen New York venues. The heart of the programming is at City Center, where this year's lineup includes: Alfonso Losa and Patricia Guerrero (Mar 6) in the NYC premiere of Alter Ego, joined by vocalists Sandra Carrasco and Ismael “El Bola” and guitarist Jose Manuel Martinez “El Peli"; Compañía Manuel Liñán (Mar 7) in the NYC premiere of Muerta de Amor (Dead in Love), featuring seven dancers and five musicians; and Compañía Eva Yerbabuena (Mar 8–9) in Yerbagüena (Oscuro Brillante), in which one of Flamenco's most celebrated figures draws from what she's learned in her 40-year career to combine and contrast old and new forms of the art. The festival also includes music, dance and film events at locations including Joe's Pub, Jazz at Lincoln Center, Le Poisson Rouge and Instituto Cervantes. Information and ticketing for all shows can be found on Flamenco Festival's Spanish-language website.

The German company Gauthier Dance//Dance Company Theaterhaus Stuttgart, founded by Canadian expat Eric Gauthier, made its Joyce debut in 2017 with a full-length ballet about the Russian dance legend Vaslav Nijinsky. It returns in 2025 with a varied bill that includes Gauthier's own solo piece ABC as well as three works by Israeli dance makers: Sharon Eyal's envy-themed Point and Hofesh Shechter's Swan Lake riff ;Swan Cake—both commissioned by the company—and Ohad Naharin's ebullient and much-loved 1999 neostandard Minus 16.

Dance titan Twyla Tharp returns to City Center to mark her company's 60th anniversary with a pair of diamonds: her long 1998 piece Diabelli, which rides the changing moods of Beethoven's challenging Diabelli Variations; and her new work, Slacktide, set to Philip Glass’s Aguas da Amazonia (arranged and performed live on custom-designed instruments by members of Third Coast Percussion). The ensemble includes Renan Cerdeiro, Angela Falk, Miriam Gittens, Zachary Gonder, Oliver Greene-Cramer, Kyle Halford, Daisy Jacobson, Marzia Memoli, Nicole Ashley Morris, Molly Rumble, Alexander Peters and Reed Tankersley. 

Germaine Ingram performs a solo dance piece that situates a single human lifetime against the geological time span of the planet. Conceived by Makini and co-directed by Anderson Feliciano and Nefertiti Charlene Altán, the piece is the first work in the futurist-minded multidisciplinary series Terrestrial, which aims to "recalibrate social, cultural and physical existence."

The lanky Andy Warhol devotee and rising dance superstar Raja Feather Kelly—who choreographed the back-to-back Pulitzer Prize–winning theater works A Strange Loop and Fairview—uses the story of six rabbits stuck together in a house to examine questions of human nature in the modern world of reality television and surveillance culture. The piece is performed by six members of his Brooklyn dance-theater company, the feath3r theory.

Clymene Aldinger's Clymove Dance marks its fifth anniversary with a spring run at Live Arts. The mixed bill of six works includes the world premiere of Aldinger own Martha Always Said as well as "message-driven" commissioned works by JoVonna Parks and several pieces from the company's repertory. The gala opener on March 19 honors two of Aldinger's college dance mentors, Ana Marie Forsythe and the late Denise Jefferson. 

92NY's Harkness Dance Center hosts two nights of performances tied to the sixth annual edition of the Ladies in the Shoe Tap Conference, a hub for female tap dancers created by one of the most promiment names in the field, the Astaire Award winner Dormeshia (After Midnight). The nine acts in the show, selected from video applications, include performers from across the country as well as Canada and Japan, accompanied by a live jazz trio. Broadway regular Aisha Jackson (Once Upon a One More Time) makes a guest appearance. 

Chicago's popular Hubbard Street, under the guidance of artistic director Linda-Denise Fisher-Harrell, returns to its NYC pied-à-terre at the Joyce Theatre. The program this time comprises Ohad Naharin's early all-male quintet Black Milk (1990) and the New York premieres of FLOCK's Into Being, Johan Inger’s Impasse and resident artist Aszure Barton's A Duo.

The New York–based classical Chinese dance company and promotional behemoth Shen Yun, founded in 2006 by practitioners of Falun Gong, is perhaps better know for its saturation advertising—assisted by Falun Gong's far-right media arm The Epoch Times—than for its traditionalist pageants of precommunist Chinese culture. Drawing on ancient folklore, the company surveys five millennia of Chinese culture and spirituality in a production that combines ornate costumes, elaborate staging and a large orchestra that features both Eastern and Western instruments.