Variety

VARIETY is a punk-noir, live-cinema adaptation of Bette Gordon’s 1983 feminist cult film, created and performed inside the former porn cinema Splendid—its neon ghosts, velvet shadows, and architectural memory becoming integral to the dramaturgy. For one week, the abandoned movie house was reactivated as a hybrid performance environment, where theatre and cinema aesthetics intertwined. The show was performed to sold-out audiences and received an enthusiastic review in Le Temps, which praised its audacity and formal invention.
The staging embraced the building’s charged history. Cameras moved through the aisles, hallways, bathrooms, projection booth and adjacent streets, capturing the performers in real time and projecting their images onto multiple screens throughout the space. The architecture of the cinema—its mirrors, its decay, its lingering intimacy—became both set and collaborator. Live video, sound, and performance collided to create a fragmented, sensorial portrait of desire, voyeurism, power, and the female gaze.
VARIETY unfolded as a multilayered investigation into what it means to watch and be watched. It reactivated the cinema as a site of fantasy, danger, and political urgency—transforming Gordon’s film into an immersive, contemporary experience where spectators entered a world of shifting frames, unstable identities, and seductive, disturbing images.
This Splendid Cinema incarnation marked a new, expanded chapter of the project: a live-cinema performance that reclaimed an abandoned movie theatre and turned it into a laboratory of vision, desire, and radical storytelling.