About a year ago, the performance artist H Plewis began collecting her own menstrual blood. She then mixed it with jelly and let it set into the form of a rabbit. “I thought jelly was a good substance as it reminded me of the plasma in your period,” she says. For Plewis, her own blood had become a piece of art.

“When I first had my period, I didn’t want to tell anybody,” she says, about what inspired her. “I kept it secret for quite a long time until my father found out. So I wanted to turn that shame into something quite visceral and visual. Get close to my blood, feel it and handle it.”

The rabbit will feature in her act in the show Dr Carnesky’s Incredible Bleeding Woman, which premieres tomorrow at the Soho theatre in London. The cabaret show intertwines politics with entertainment; there will be illusions, sword swallowing and hair hanging. And lots of blood.

“It’s up to the audience to figure out which blood is fake and which isn’t,” says Marisa Carnesky, the show’s director. Women are scattered around the chilly basement rehearsal room. Plewis is lying on the floor writing a monologue, lighting designer Nao Nagai is gently rocking a sleeping baby, and performer Molly Beth Morossa is on her way to buy some mugs. All are in the midst of planning and rehearsing the upcoming show.

“We are playing with the idea that menstruating is magic,” says Carnesky. To her, there is more to the idea than mere entertainment value.

The show’s thesis is based on work by the radical anthropologist Chris Knight, who, drawing on the ideas of Friedrich Engels, claims that the transition from primate to human culture was through the discovery of female solidarity. As women supposedly synchronised their menstruations to the 29-day cycle of the moon, men were, in theory, able to go hunting knowing their women wouldn’t be harassed by other men for sex.

“Looking at this research, you can come to the conclusion that the idea of witches came from these events, where women came together on the dark moon to seclude themselves and menstruate,” Carnesky eagerly explains. It’s a theory she’s so passionate about that it has inspired not just her show but also an activist movement, named the Menstronauts. “We recreate menstrual rituals, teaching our bodies to run in tandem with the planets,” she says.

H Plewis in Dr Carnesky’s Incredible Bleeding Woman.

Since the 1970s, many art forms have touched on the subject of menstruation, attempting to subvert societal discomfort with a physiological experience most women have. Coinciding with the women’s liberation movement, pieces such as Judy Chicago’s Red Flag, a photolithograph of a woman’s hand taking a bloodied tampon out of her vagina, provoked both awe and disgust.

The concept of using menstrual blood to create art has gained even more prominence in the past few years. Vanessa Tiegs coined the term “menstrala” in 2000 to describe her paintings that used menstrual blood. She echoes what Carnesky says about the importance of menstrual cycles. The phrase rhymes with “mandala”, which fits well with the idea of menstruation making us whole, she says, hoping that the name will become a way to unify menstrual artists.

For Jen Lewis, a more recent convert to the menstrala movement, it was using a menstrual cup that changed things. “The first time I poured out my menstrual cup, I noticed how the thick fluid interacted with the water. As someone who studied art, I started thinking about Jackson Pollock, so I asked my husband if he could help me photograph it,” she says. The result is an ongoing series of photographs of her period creating bloody shapes in toilet bowls. She calls it Beauty in Blood.

Lewis wants her photographs to be the starting point for people to confront the stigma that has surrounded menstruation for decades. “The female body is leaky; it has breast milk and menstrual fluids. These are all things that are in opposition to the male body,” she says. Our culture’s shame has become profitable, Lewis believes. “The easiest way to sell a product is by making it taboo. It’s easier to pin us to these menstrual management products if we continue to believe that it isn’t normal.”

Menstrala art is often interwoven with activism, which is the case for both Lewis and the Carnesky crew. “Generally, menstrual activism strives to resist menstrual shame, and expand knowledge and care options,” says Chris Bobel, author of New Blood: Third Wave Feminism and the Politics of Menstruation. She believes art is an important medium to initiate change. “Art of this kind provocatively challenges the viewer to assess their assumptions about menstrual taboos. It can upend what is taken for granted, and that’s powerful.”

Bobel also mentions Gloria Steinem’s 70s essay If Men Could Menstruate, where Steinem argues that, if the shoe was on the other foot, men would deem the experience worthy of pride. “Menstruation is a biological process, but its meaning is gendered. And because it’s largely a woman’s experience, it’s devalued,” she says.

Back at the rehearsal space, Carnesky says she believes art and subcultures are key to challenging norms. “As women, we’ve internalised a misogynist culture that has tabooed menstruation and said it is dirty. Reclaiming it is so important because it’s one of the most powerful things the body goes through and we should celebrate that.”