Late Night Insane Musing: F Cube

As a performance artist, my name is Flaming Phalanges. Since I open all my oeuvres angrily chanting with the crowd about my "Flaming! Fucking! Phalanges!", my younger in-the-know fans (who may or may not have taken Anatomy 101 yet) refer to me as F Cube. Yeah, I'm a stickler for spelling but it's cool; the nickname gives me a little 90's hip hop street cred with a nod to classic rock at the same time. You know the old Pink Floyd lyrics: "We don't need no education." Yeah, man. We don't need no fuckin' spelling, either. We put our backs into it. We got F Cube, baby. 

My signature move is a fast, heels-only walking across the stage, knees slightly bent, legs slightly apart. I pick up various household objects with only the fold of my palm... and then drop them. Part of the allure for my audience is trying to determine my reaction to dropping the items, depending upon what they are. Windex bottle: I shrug and contract in angst. Remote control as I lie supine: simmering furor. 16 x 20 mirror at the finale: an explosion of mock jubilance followed by frenzied sweeping with a heavy broom, followed by more dropping of the broom, which incites faster, more furious sweeping. I end the piece by smashing the broom to the floor and exiting the stage. Does she end in victory or defeat, my audience wonders, murmuring to one another as they crumple their Playbills, gathering their belongings and meekly filing out of the amphitheater.

Neo-grunge group Screaming Knees accompanies me in my most lauded work, performing their rainy day B-side dirge, "Norco is Worthless" in the round so the audience can sit close enough to appreciate the intricacy of the choreography.  My knees and ankles are mic'ed so that I may join the band in my own bio-percussion solo. The choreographic motif involves a lot of rolling: actually rolling on the floor, rolling of ankles, flexing back toes with the opposite heel and a stuttering roll through to a pointed foot. I distribute opera glasses to the entire audience so its quite a spectacle (pardon the pun) to behold the reflection of the stage lights in countless gleaming lenses studding the velvet-dark arena like a galaxy of stars. The audience truly becomes part of the art as the inert, useless heavens observing my expressions of pain and rhythmically clicking joints from on high. 

I'm currently working on a lighter, more humorous piece to a track by Violent Sweat (featuring Ray Ray the Cat) called "Vanilla Antiperspirant (Nom Nom Nom)". It's still in production phase, but I can see early on that my character has a saccharine-sweet yet salty-tart attitude. The prop I've incorporated heavily into the choreography is an electric fan measuring six and a half feet in diameter, painted an angelic, pearlescent white. We determined that, even though I am periodically doused with buckets of water during the piece, we really wanted to drive that feeling of hot, miserable wetness home for the audience. Therefore, my costumer is working on a long wet-look nightgown for me, likely made with a pastel ciré Lycra for a look that is sloppily sexy yet innocently frigid. Barring any electrocution risks, the performance promises to be positively high voltage!