Dance : Collage Dance Theater at Loyola

The way fashion keeps women enslaved has long been a subject of feminist dance.

In the ‘80s, choreographers showed us lobotomized gamins striking poses in fancy lingerie--and blamed it all on men. Today, when Madonna has appropriated that imagery to glorify herself, a new generation is asking why women literally buy into their oppression.

Collage Dance Theater explored facets of the issue in a performance Friday afternoon in and around the fountain-pool in front of the Foley Building at Loyola Marymount University. This locally based group often stages site-specific parodies of pop culture, and in the one-act “Foundations,” Loyola Marymount students joined company members for a broad, clever look at the lure of synthetic beauty.

Beginning with a cosmetic makeover like the ones shown on those program-length commercials infecting cable TV, “Foundations” used choreography by Heidi Duckler, text by Merridawn Duckler and visual concepts by Antoinette LaFarge to depict women desperate to bolster their self-esteem.

Eight prom queens in long gowns and sneakers teetered across the plaza and then waded into the knee-deep pool, pulling large fluorescent letters from the water and sticking them onto the wall behind them. The word Ponder became Powder and then Power. Promise evolved into Compromise and later just Prom.

Meanwhile, some of the women executed unison cycles of semaphoric motion, arm-wrestled, raced around the pool to pick up handbags and used transparent plastic sheets as capes or stoles--sometimes accompanied by pop records and sometimes by a mock-journalistic survey on the importance of breast size.

In the piece’s ultimate satiric image, a fisherman used a glove as bait and hooked one of the wading prom queens, dumping her (gasping and flopping) on dry land. The consumer-as-victim: a message that couldn’t have been more obvious if Collage had spelled it out using the stick-on letters. A sharp, resourceful work, skillfully crafted.