ELOINA'S HIGH STEAKS Comes to New Diorama Theatre in March

ELOINA's High Steaks is coming to New Diorama Theatre in March. Performances will run 12 - 23 March 2024.

A thought-provoking, vulnerable, and healing show about labia-shaming, cosmetic surgery and fundamentally, labia celebration. Melding performance art and comedy clowning, ELOINA hangs two beef steaks from her labia, butchers them up, cooks them on a grill and serves them in HIGH STEAKS discussing the rising demands in young people for labiaplasty, the surgery to make the labia smaller and more symmetrical. Created in response to her own experience of wanting labiaplasty when she was ten years old, ELOINA considers her own and other’s labia and the obscene pressure for this body part to conform to what we see and expect from media. The show is directed by performance artist Louise Orwin (Pretty Ugly, Oh Yes Oh No).

ELOINA performs in the nude to create a safe space for vulnerability, education, and empowerment with a soundscape of true experiences from other people about their relationships with their labia and how society conditioned them to want to change their appearance. Speaking about how we are generationally taught and learn shame, ELOINA’s mum Annie features in the show and reminds us how important what we share and say to others is.Through live conversations with Annie and recorded interviews with other labia-owners, including cisgender women, non-binary people and transgender men, the show is an emotional and intimate call for education to increase visibility of varied vulvas and for us to celebrate them in all their shapes and sizes.

ELOINA said, “This is a highly personal show about body shaming and awareness, born out of my experience of wanting labiaplasty when I was only 10 years old. As the rate of young people requesting labiaplasty is rising, I want this show to remind people that their bodies are imperfect, and beautifully and rightfully so. I perform naked to de-censor my body for myself, which is how I’ve grown to love my body, and for the audience, who often leave and look at their own, some for the first time. The show is a mixture of my own story and interviews with many others who have experienced shame around their vulvas, including non-binary people, trans men, and cis women of all ages. This show screams the question ‘what are we fed as young as 10 years old that make us want to cut off parts of our body?’ Where did that come from? Where does it stop? This show is where it stops.”

ELOINA is a queer, multidisciplinary artist who makes work that dismantles taboos around the female body. She mixes epic, body-based performance art and quick, comedy clowning to make her work accessibly impactful at both the extremes and the in-betweens of the art world. Since graduating from the innovative Drama degree at Queen Mary University of London in 2018, her solo practice has spread across London, opening conversations about menstruation, body hair, labiaplasty, vaginoplasty, female masturbation and ejaculation, motherhood, and breastfeeding. HIGH STEAKS was developed in residency at PARL (Performance Art Research, Ljubljana) in August 2021. Eloina has previously staged the show at VAULT Festival (2023) where she won the Show of the Week Award and the Summerhall Pick of VAULT Award. The show was then performed at Summehall for Edimburgh Festival Fringe 2023 and won the Summerhall Lustrum Award, as well as being nominated for three Offie Awards this year.

Louise Orwin makes research-based performance and video projects about what it means to identify as a queer femme, in a world that prizes masculinity, straightness, whiteness. Her work is provocative, political, slippery, and guaranteed to get under your skin. In 2013, Louise broke the internet when she began making Pretty Ugly, a project exploring teenage girls’ online identities. The show premiered at Camden People’s Theatre and toured 2013-2016. In 2015, Louise won the Flying Solo Award for A Girl and A Gun, a show interrogating women and violence on film, which starred her and an unprepared male performer every night. The show toured the UK extensively and completed a run of Edinburgh Festival Fringe at Summerhall in 2017 before winning the Highly Commended Award at VAULT Festival in 2018. Louise’s other work includes CRY CRY KILL KILL (2018) and REALLY BAD (2020) at Sherman Theatre and The Yard Theatre.

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