The Ruby Town Oracle

This is about immersing yourself in a new world, not only intellectually and spiritually, but also with your whole body. The audience moves around in a derelict city made of freight containers. They take part in life in this no-man’s land, drinking and dancing with the inhabitants, getting a massage or visiting a peepshow. Soldiers go on patrol, arrest visitors and interrogate them. The underlying themes are power, proximity and deception, a strange young woman who sleeps for days and weeks on end in a shrine above the container city and then suddenly awakes. Her name is Martha Rubin. You can visit her, make sacrifices to her, and hope that she opens her eyes for a few moments. “Die Erscheinungen der Martha Rubin” is a highly unusual form of theatre. The performers improvise for up to 84 hours, yet most of them are not professional actors. The audience can influence and decide what they experience. They research the background and are like ethnologists – or just observers and tourists, if they prefer. The Danish-Austrian performance duo SIGNA reproduces the fascination of computer games in real life and brings remarkable immediacy and warmth to the theatre, as well as a strong element of unsettling energy.