High Steaks – New Diorama Theatre, London

Performance art meets issue-led theatre in High Steaks, as ELOINA empowers herself and her audience by dispelling myth, secrecy and shame and celebrating labia in all their glorious forms.

Content warning: we’re going to talk about labia and vulvas a lot, and the show involves nudity and discussion of surgery, labia shaming but also body positivity.  Definitely NSFW. Also not safe for vegetarians I guess?

High Steaks

It’s not too long ago I was researching and writing about the history and preservation of performance art.  Little did I know at that point that I would soon have the opportunity to see a work of performance-art-meets-theatre for myself.  And yet that is just what happened last night.

High Steaks is a work by queer, multidisciplinary performer ELOINA.  In it, she explores her relationship with her labia, from intense shame at the age of only ten to confidence and love for her labia today.  She does this naked, while acting out on the literal strips of meat she pegs to her own labia some of the violence and emotion we vulva owners (the show’s preferred term) enact on our anatomy.

As this brief description hopefully illuminates, High Steaks is a wild ride.  An accordion features early on.  There is stand in pubic hair as well as stand in labia.  ELOINA invites an audience member to draw hers.  There’s extended discussion of the labia of her forebears, with visual aids.  Oh, and her mum is here.  Then she prepares and cooks up all the stand in labia with a chimichurri of stand in pubes.  Bet you’ve never seen anything like that before.

Perhaps such a radical approach is necessary to dispell the shame so many vulva owners feel.  Shame that may be hereditary, passed down by mothers who feel it themselves.  Or shame that is acquired based on an offhand or teasing comment by a doctor, a friend, a lover.  From textbook diagrams that sanitise the many and varied forms of vulvas and labia.  Or even from the terms themselves: labia minor (the inner ones) suggests that they are smaller than the outer ones, while I learned yesterday that this is not the case for the majority of women.  Shame, unfortunately, that leads a growing number of women to have medically unnecessary cosmetic labiaplasties.  And this is before we even get into the horrors of FGM and how it is linked to shame and control of women’s bodies.  This latter is not a topic High Steaks delves into, but relevant, I think.

Theatre, Clowning, and Performance Art

In using her own body as subject and medium, ELOINA follows in the footsteps of many performance artists before her.  There’s Valie Export who in 1969 performed Aktionshose: Genitalpanik (‘Action Pants: Genital Panic’), wearing crotchless trousers to expose her genitals to an audience.  Or Carolee Schneemann who in 1975 extracted from her vagina and read a scroll in Interior Scroll.  Actually, most female performance artists I can think of (like Marina Abramović, Yoko Ono, Ana Mendieta), have used their own bodies to comment on feminism, society’s attitudes to women, sexuality, violence, and other important topics.

Is this performance art, or is it theatre? In my earlier post I defined performance art as follows:

• It shifts the focus of art from completing a finished work to a volatile and unpredictable live performance.
• It aims to break down conventional narratives through a focus on provocation, absurdity, irony, parody or destruction.
• “Performance art tries to blur the boundaries between art and reality, artist and spectator” (Giesen, 2006). It is arguably the perspective of the audience that transforms the artist’s act into art.

I’m not going to get too much into detail on this point, but ELOINA’s work is most certainly a live performance aiming to break down conventional narratives using provocation and absurdity, with the active participation of the audience. Thankfully only the stand-in labia are destroyed. It is scripted and thus not entirely volatile (actually a lot of the show consists of ELOINA butchering her meat labia while listening to recordings of cis, trans and non-binary vulva owners talk about their labia – Sound Design by Sammy Metcalf, Louise Orwin, Tom Foskett-Barnes), but there is room for spontaneity. Despite that provocation, however, High Steaks is, importantly, a safe space for both audience and performer. For me this takes it out of pure performance art, where performers often seem to relish risk and danger, without making it any less important.

High Steaks is on tour until May (ish). Whether you love theatre, performance art, cabaret, clowning, and whether as a vulva owner you love your body or are still on the journey, this is a show worth seeing. It’s an empowering watch, and an interesting communal experience as an audience member. Oh, and don’t miss out on the temporary tattoos afterwards.

Salterton Arts Review’s rating: 3.5/5

High Steaks on at New Diorama Theatre until 23 March 2024. More info and tickets here.