“How to survive in a world populated by scum?”, Jacques Rivette once wrote of Paul Verhoeven's film. In 1995, the Dutch director filmed the grandeur and decadence of Las Vegas as a premonitory metaphor for an America that gorges itself on crass vulgarity and crushes people. The incandescent and obscene film shows without comment the fate of a young woman who has come to try her luck in the city of gambling and easy money. She accepts all kinds of humiliations and becomes a predator herself, ready to do anything to survive. Poorly received by critics and audiences alike on its release, it is now recognised as a monument of queer counter-culture, camp and pop expressionism; a cult film in which lightness, glitter and glitz describe the struggle of classes and sexes and relationships of domination and submission. Showgirls is a major film about gender, its violence and its metamorphoses.

Marlène Saldana is a multi-talented actress who played an ambivalent and voguing Jacques Demy in Christophe Honoré's Les Idoles, as well as the more outlandish creatures that populate Sophie Perez and Xavier Boussiron's shows. This time, she dives into the contradictory, bloated and delirious mental universe of Nomi, the heroine of Paul Verhoeven's film. Between impotence and self-assertion, glitz and gloom, she struts about the stage as a powerful and clownish woman in a vulgar and crazy world. Like Nomi, she dances on a volcano, a nipple that evokes the absurdity of Beckett's Happy Days as much as a podium for a Copi-like performance. Her Showgirl is a grotesque monologue, a queer stand-up set, a techno oratorio exalted by the relentless score composed by Julia Lanoë, aka Rebekka Warrior (Sexy Sushi, Kompromat, Mansfield.TYA): a lucid, joyful and nightmarish vision of a society sick of its patriarchal stereotypes and of a resurrection through derision, sequins and intoxication.