In order to properly outfit a dancer, you can’t forget the slippers, embarrassingly tight tights, leggings and, of course, a hefty length of cable.
And while most dancers tend not to trip the light fantastic while bound and gagged, Inbal Pinto’s do.
The eponymous choreographer of Tel Aviv’s Inbal Pinto Dance Company and her longtime partner (in the theater and at home), director Avshalom Pollack, have created a warped, surreal yet oddly graceful world of dance in their latest production, “Oyster,” which makes its West Coast debut in San Francisco on Friday, May 5.
And those costumes can readily be described as part Salvador Dali, part Peter Pan, part Marquis de Sade. Ropes tied between fingers and toes and swirled this way and that restrict and alter dancers’ natural movements. Some costumes have no hands, others cover the dancers’ mouths. Dancers are lashed to each other or a third dancer or, in one memorable set, a wagon. And many dancers wear Kathy Rigby-style harnesses which allow them to soar through the air and tiptoe along their dance partner’s shoulders. It’s ballet meets circus meets a peyote binge.
Of course, those outfits do seem par for the course in a show based on Tim Burton’s rhyming bit of doggerel poetry, “The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy,” a tale of a couple who give birth to a crustacean utilized by his father as an aphrodisiac.
But it’s hardly a literal retelling of Burton’s tale (thank God).
“We had the show and then we had to find the title. We saw this book and liked the name ‘Oyster,'” explained Pollack in a phone interview from the couple’s Tel Aviv home.
“Every name we pick for our productions is not necessarily something we know there is really a connection, [but] a feeling, an instinct, a flavor. Something is going to be good with this name.”
In other words, an “Oyster” by any other name would smell as sweet — and surreal. And, as far as unusual titles go, a previous Pinto-Pollack collaboration was titled “Boobies,” and was, of course, a dance about — birds.
When asked what “Oyster” was about, Pinto said she’d rather not give away too much. She’d much prefer if the audience came in fresh and took in the show without any preconceptions.
“It is surreal, but there are multiple layers inside the show. It has its own logical world for us, but not necessarily for other people. I think the wonderful thing is the audience can make their own interpretations of the stories based on sounds, the view, the movement, whatever they see on stage,” she said.
“It can be a strange circus that makes you feel you somehow saw it somewhere. It is something which is fantastic, yet familiar and close. It’s something which maybe a little bit resembles a dream. You don’t really know what’s going to happen.”
You don’t know if the dancers are going to stay on the ground or soar into the air. And you don’t even know if they’ll be dancing to classical, dance hall or Latin-themed numbers. You’ll have to keep a close eye on your assigned seat number, because that may be the first, last and only definite thing in the theater.
But if you really want to get the “Oyster” experience, purge this article from your memory.
“I think the most important thing is to forget what we just said,” Pollack stressed.
“I think people should come with an open mind.”
The Inbal Pinto Dance Company will perform “Oyster” at 8 p.m. Friday, May 5 and Saturday, May 6, and at 2 p.m. Sunday, May 7 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater, 700 Howard St. at Third, S.F. Tickets range from $24 to $45. Information: www.performances.org or (415) 392-2545.