Boca Tuya & Omar Román de Jesús: In Motion
Press, Commissions, Design, Fashion, Education & Conversations on Movement and Creation
"...choreographer Omar Román de Jesús has racked up several notable honors — from festivals, foundations and Dance Magazine, among others — that herald a promising new voice in dance."
—Brian Schaefer
“When we were putting together a list of artists for this year’s programming, we kept coming back to Omar. He has such an exciting, unique aesthetic that we felt was important to share with our dance patrons as well as our students.”
—Marsha Barsky Chair of Dance Department at Kennesaw State University
Press
Dive into the stories that capture our journey
​Sombreristas as a Gift
by Moisés García B.
“Sombreristas”—a rather unique word, one might say—is the title of this refreshing and profound piece, measured and detailed, performed by Boca Tuya, a dance company that seems to have found the formula for creating choreographic works that are both successful and delightful for dance lovers. More importantly, they also captivate first-time audiences, who need to leave feeling happy and full—eager to return.
2024
De Jesús seemed to explode from nowhere onto the New York scene last year when Ballet Hispanico featured his work in its City Center season. During 2022 and 2023, the Puerto Rican born choreographer quietly racked up a perfect trifecta of prizes, between the Dance Magazine
Harkness Promise Award, the Princess Grace Award, and a NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship. This 92NY show from Harkness Dance Center, where de Jesús is currently in residence, is a promising debut—the first full evening of his own choreography.
2024
But just a couple of minutes into artistic director Omar Román de Jesús’ group work Los Perros del Barrio Colosal, I feel my shoulders relax. This guy knows what he’s doing. While the dance might not always gel with its program notes, it not only stands on its own, but, better yet, it shows a sense of humor.
2024
The piece had a perfect name: “Like Those Playground Kids at Midnight.” Indeed, I felt like I was watching two adolescents who were beginning to explore their emerging and formidable physical strength through fierce and complex—but somehow still delicate and tender—partnering, and at the same time were confronting their incipient desire and budding sexuality, and doing it all with a kind of innocence and naïveté that forebode danger and perhaps even heartbreak. The piece was very poignant, often during brief moments of stillness. The original score for the piece, by Jesse Scheinin, countered and complemented the piece thoughtfully.
2024
The work: Caress them in a way that hurts a little...
...lighting design allowed the dancers’ entrances and exits—executed in full view of the audience—to feel like we were watching a film. It evoked cinematic editing techniques like fade in and fade out, creating seamless dissolves that let the performers seem to disappear without actually leaving the stage. The ending, with a persistent rain effect—without water—amplified the cinematic experience, without being film. Truly brilliant.​
That night, I went to sleep deeply satisfied, thinking: theater still has a lot to learn from dance.
2024
"COME... THE SUN DOESN'T WAIT" by Omar Román De Jesús...
A performer snapped their fingers and snow began to fall from the ceiling, eventually lightly covering the stage in a white dust. The muted tone and uncanny dreamscape deepened. This was the careful construction of a dream world: mad and tender, dark and lovely, warm and frightening. It seemed to be a tender view into the crevices of a well-worn mind - a world built of overlapping memories or of imaginary friends half remembered.
2024
Omar Román De Jesús’ duet Like Those Playground Kids at Midnight blew me out of the water. His style, particularly in Like Those Playground Kids at Midnight, is slithery and acrobatic. Cat-like. The chemistry between De Jesús and fellow dancer Ian Spring was electric, and the innovative partnering was playful and tender and rubbed up perfectly against Jesse Sheinin’s eerie musical score. The closing image—one man swinging the other in mid-air—brought to mind a figure skating death spiral, then a roundabout at a playground and then deep fear, and finally, the dizziness of young love. When this piece is performed again, I will be there.
2023
..."My work relies heavily on abstract narrative. Since concert contemporary dance, my main genre, can be notoriously hard to follow even with a more lateral narrative structure, it is important to me to create characters with clear functions within my abstract worlds. During my fellowship, I focused on developing legible characters through the creation of a solo where one dancer embodied several different people (and one chicken).
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I used both movement and text to understand the nuances and motives of each of these characters. I worked to craft movement scores for unearthing the core of each character. By learning how to teach many characters to one dancer, I was able to create methodologies that could also translate to generating singular characters for individual dancers."
2023
New Sleep was followed by Papagayos, choreographed by Omar Román de Jesús, in a brilliant debut for the Company. A dystopian game of musical chairs, Papagayos has a kind of fluid languor and undertone of danger. Amanda del Valle, bedecked in colorful fringed rather like an otherworldly jester, introduced the action, cavorting about the stage as she weaved in and around the game. Charming and fleet of foot, del Valle was both guide and observer of the action – the puppeteer behind the puppeteer, as the game itself was commanded by a male character who dictated the fall and rise of the needle with a gesture of his hat. As dancers wafted to the ground, they would rise again in various haunting solos and duets.
2023
ARTS ATL:
New York’s Boca Tuya company brings dreamscapes, mayhem to Kennesaw State by Robin Wharton
With his increased visibility as an artist, Román de Jesús hopes he can help pave the way for more leaders like himself to get their work recognized and celebrated and “remove the ingrained expectation that people from marginalized communities can only make valuable work if the work itself tells an advocacy story or reveals some kind of trauma.”
2023
As this tragi-comedy unfolds, it appears that the power belongs to whoever wears Baldwin’s hat. When Del Valle has it, the executions continue with a perverse twist, and like any tin-pot dictator she enjoys watching the company shuffle in a Zombie prison march. Yes, this is our world, and it will only improve when, like Pisano Orozco, at the end of Papagayos, we are able to refuse the urge to command.
2021
..."As an artist, Román De Jesús infuses his own Puerto Rican heritage and queer identity into his work, but it’s often a source of conflict for the 29 year-old.
“My movement vocabulary is influenced by that, but it’s also influenced by others, like Chinese or African-American choreographers,” he said. “Plus, I work with who I have. One dancer is so comfortable with himself, and he’s flamboyant and sassy, so I work that into his character. But I’m not about making this queer or that Puerto Rican, because I’d rather work with their personalities...”