How did Raja Feather Kelly — known for his imaginative dance-theater excavations of pop and queer culture — end up as a go-to choreographer for Off Broadway shows?

One reason, an obvious one, had to do with a close friend. As soon as the playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins started to pass his name along to people in the theater world, Mr. Kelly found himself in demand. First, in 2016, came Adrienne Kennedy’s “Funnyhouse of a Negro.” Next was Suzan-Lori Parks’s “The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World,” directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz.

“She said, ‘I have this ensemble, and I don’t want them to leave the stage so I need to think about their physicality and their bodies,’” Mr. Kelly recalled. “Then Branden had a show called ‘Everybody’ with 15-foot dancing skeletons and an idea that there would be a death dance. When I got the script, the page was blank.”

Soon, he found himself filling a niche Off Broadway. “I was working on new plays that wanted to have a physical life, but didn’t know how,” he said. “I walk in and it’s like, ‘We know we want movement and we want to bring the show to life and we want the bodies to be stylistic and particular, and we feel like working with a choreographer would help us do that.’”