As New York City Ballet opened its spring season at the David H. Koch Theater on Tuesday, one man in the audience stood out in a conspicuous disguise of fedora and sunglasses. Those in the know could recognize this as the costume of J R, the artist responsible for the giant photograph of City Ballet dancers that covered the floor of the theater’s promenade earlier this year.

He might be excused for not removing his hat. He’s accustomed to working in the street, and, apparently, he attended his first ballet mere months ago. Besides, this was a special occasion. The ballet he was about to watch was his own.

The evening’s premiere, “Les Bosquets,” was by him, his first attempt at any kind of formal theater. It was inspired by the project that initially gained him fame, a decade ago, when he pasted on the walls of Parisian housing projects photo portraits of the people living there. Those portraits became an inadvertent backdrop to riots, and it is those riots that “Les Bosquets” seeks to represent.

J R is credited for the concept and staging. It was Peter Martins, the company’s ballet master in chief, who had to translate J R’s ideas into ballet steps. Considering such an odd and indirect arrangement, the piece, which lasts only eight minutes, does not begin so badly.