Music and Dance Reviews : DuPeron’s It Squad in ‘Don’t Panic’

Local dancer Lori DuPeron has probably spent more of her public life in lingerie than anyone besides Madonna--and there she was again, stripped to bra and panties festooned with dollar bills, Friday on the Barnsdall Park Gallery stage.

In most of her evening-long “Don’t Panic,” DuPeron and her seven-member It Squad explored facets of contemporary desperation.

The satiric, collaborative Earth Day finale, “Panic on the Planet,” attempted a social perspective, but otherwise DuPeron sought to externalize personal feelings: rage against demeaning work (“Degrees of Freedom”) and hopeless relationships (“The Living Room”), alarm over women stifled by regimentation (“No Figs in Eden,” “Et la Femme”) and the sense that young people today go through private agonies under pitiless public scrutiny (“P.S. Ehh?” plus several of the previously cited pieces).

DuPeron proved a forceful performer, especially effective at the extremes of her range: lobotomized stupor and incoherent fury. Beth Corell, Shannon Holt and, especially, David Leahy provided skillful support. However, DuPeron’s rudimentary, pantomime-and-semaphore dance style seldom probed her subjects deeply. Worse, her hyper-chic pictorial sense made these short, elliptic pieces play like Angst -ridden commercials for perfume: upscale designer Expressionism.

Since MTV offers hourly testimony that doll-vixens suffer just like everyone else, it’ll take more to sell this theme in the theater than just glamorous poor-little-Lori platitudes decorated by lush Eileen Cooley lighting, resourceful Sanja Hays costumes and moody Mark Governor music. Whether the It Squad has it remains to be seen.