Ruby Town

Sometimes you're reminded of just how limited your experiences are, of how little you can see and do at any possible moment. Normally, this is not an experience you receive from theater and if so, only in the juxtaposition of your life with the one on stage; but after twelve hours of listening, talking, watching and making bread with the forty some odd performers of "Die Erscheinungen von Martha Rubin" (or "The Ruby Town Oracle"), this was exactly the feeling I had, that I'd seen nothing or next to nothing, nothing of what happened or what was going to happen

By Shane Anderson

For those inclined towards existential brooding or emo-poetics might
mourn all they didn't know, but for my part, I found it quite
liberating, as if there were no expectations of me and my experience,
that I could take whatever I wanted from Ruby Town; and it was this
feeling, in the end, that made me really appreciate the project despite
the numerous gripes I had with the aesthetics and the, at times,
substandard performance.
"The Ruby Town Oracle," a nonstop performance first seen in EP format at
Cologne's Halle Kalke in October 2007, was granted LP status for
Berlin's Theatertreffen 2008, where it clocked in at over 192 hours of
performance time. That's right, that means 8 days of "theater" straight.
Though daunting in scope to the average theatergoer, Ruby Town's
delicate mixture of installation, performance art, theater and video
game worlds has proven to be the speciality of artistic duo SIGNA, Signa
Sørensen (a Danish performance and installation artist) and Arthur
Köstler (an Austrian performance and media artist). In their numerous
performances SIGNA have constructed mental institutions, schools,
hospitals and hotels amongst other things; and like in video games, the
theatergoer is not simply a viewer but an active participant, a gamer,
where the borders between public and private, viewer and participant,
fictional and real, collide and collapse upon one another in a Brechtian
Lehrstück without any clear rational lesson.
This time around, SIGNA created a steam-punk like world full of gypsies,
misfits and carneys (as well as military personnel) in a place called
Ruby Town, a shanty town comprised of freight containers, scraps of wood
and personal belongings of bygone ages. In Ruby Town, you, the 'viewer,'
could gab, take part in rituals, have your hair done, drink yourself
silly, and eat with the 'natives;' you could buy drinks, food, sweets,
smut and booze; you could worship an idol, talk to the idol and lose
yourself in the smell of baby powder. And like being a tourist in a
Mexican border town, there was always the consciousness that you were
doing something dirty, that the residents were taking as much advantage
of you as you were of them. Brilliant.

If you'll forgive the extended metaphor, 'visiting' "The Ruby Town
Oracle" was a bit like going to the museum with a group of friends, all
of whom are wearing special spectral glasses that limit the viewer's
color spectrum. For each person, the experience of a painting, then,
would be limited to what their glasses allowed them to see. Imagine
wearing these special spectral glasses and looking at "Sunday Afternoon
on the Island of La Grande Jatte." Imagine that when you look at "La
Grande Jatte," your experience is limited to the various shades of green
and blue. Imagine further, that once you leave the museum, you sit and
talk about the painting with your friends and while you explain how
complex the relationship between the greens and the blues were, one of
your friends explains he found the purples to be lacking and another
friend can barely speak after the near religious experience he had with
the yellows. Though you were all there looking at the same object, each
experienced something entirely different -if not by virtue of subjective
experience (something that varies receptions of everything) then by the
impositions of the glasses.
Like this hypothetical scenario, it was only after much discussion and
contemplation that I found "The Ruby Town Oracle" to be a rich, vibrant
experience. From my limited spectrum, I didn't much like what I saw.
Despite the fun I had teaching Misha, a young boy, card tricks to con
the other tourists and making bread and talking to Albana, I found Ruby
Town dull, cliche-laden and dishonest (in a performative sense of the
word). I felt that the interactions I had were exactly like a typical
exposé in a nineteenth century novel (but without the directory of names
at the front to help you along with all your stumbles) and if not that,
then they were a cobbling together of bits and bobs of information
stolen from Tom Waits songs and 1950s ethnography books that were full
of careless mistakes and half-baked contradictions (one actor, for
instance, oscillated between not knowing what a banjo was to the other
end of the spectrum, where he bragged that his father was a talented
banjo player).
After talking with other Ruby Town tourists, though, I began to enjoy
the experience a little more. I began to enjoy the simplicity (not of
the people but of the project), a simplicity that offered a refreshing
possibility of experiencing fiction. It was like we were all Don
Quixotes, living in our gypsy dreams. Again, even if I didn't like what
I saw, this is rather remarkable.

But what, you might ask, was the point of the performance? In other
words, what happened? This is hard to explain. On the one hand, the
answer would outline the story of "The Ruby Town Oracle," and on the
other the answer would revolve around all the interactions that took
place. As per the former, SIGNA's website does a good job of concisely
explaining what happens:

In 1880 a girl at around the age of 10 appeared in the German village
Schwarza by the temporary camp of the Cirque Rubin. The girl never
revealed her past and as no one claimed the child, she was taken into
care by the circus and was given the name Martha Rubin.
She became a graceful dancer and a remarkable horse rider, but it was
her dark gift as an oracle that won her fame as a fairground attraction
all over Europe.
Martha Rubin gave birth to 17 children out of marriage. 7 of them -
including the Siamese twins Marthina and Corina, she raised together
with the female sword swallower Cora Torrini. In 1913 Martha Rubin
disappeared without a trace from the Romanian harbor city Constanta
Throughout the many years after her disappearance Martha Rubin has
reappeared on several European locations . A vast amount of footage and
audio recordings document these occurrences. In 1933 the relatives of
Martha Rubin formed The Martha Rubin Society to collect and to
understand the signs and traces of the oracle. In our time most of
Martha Rubin?s descendants live in Ruby Town, a settlement in the
borderland between the North and the South State. For more than 30 years
Ruby Town has been of special interest to the North State military, not
only because of the illegal trade with the South but also due to an
inexplicable radiation. [...]
Narrow and twisted alleys lead through the labyrinthine heart of Ruby
Town to a shrine that for many years has contained the few belongings of
the disappeared oracle.
Now Martha Rubin herself has come back to Ruby Town from the limbo in
which she was trapped and the descendants gather around to listen to her
dark visions.

To my mind, this whole narrative is campy and a bit cheap. Situated
somewhere between dime store novels, vaudeville and that Guy Ritchie
film ("Sunday school stuff," as my grandfather in-law would put it),
SIGNA borrowed more from cliches and operated within them than it did
offer any sort of criticism or room to think about the cliches. Besides
being rather silly and naive (I agree with Joseph Campbell that our job
is not to bathe ourselves in nostalgia for a past where we were
religious but rather our task is to find the religious in our world), I
also felt like the problems "The Ruby Town Oracle" presented (especially
ideas of racism) were extraneous to the experience and outdated. When
certain characters made racist statements, I didn't really feel like my
ideas about race and class were being challenged, rather I felt like the
performers made these outlandish statements in an attempt to make the
experience more 'authentic.' But, as any blues lover knows, appeals to
authenticity are the most disingenuous and when one creates a world, one
has a certain responsibility to that world and its relationship to ours.
Moreover, if one wants to create a world that's 'authentic,' then SIGNA
should have gone a lot deeper than they did in making it authentic and
dangerous because, let's face it, places like Tijuana and Juarez, Mexico
or the Rio favelas are dangerous, dangerous places. There's no way this
group of tourists (or any group of tourists for that matter) could walk
through a shanty town like this one in the real world and not get shot
or mugged or worse. Such an intense experience would have been
'authentic' as well, but again, it's also undesirable. So, if it is the
case that they ignored plenty of claims towards authenticity, then why
hold onto the problems of racism if you're not going to say anything
about it? Kiddy pool stuff to remind us of the deep intangible waters.

But these remarks might miss the mark. SIGNA, I believe, would say the
Martha story wasn't the point and that these issues shouldn't be held in
focus. In other words, that we should concentrate instead on the
interactions between the people in the space (i.e. the other answer to
'what happens' in the piece). And while I would agree with this, it also
seems dangerous to bother with certain themes if you're not going to add
anything to discussion (perhaps they did, remember, I only saw about 14
hours of 192).

In any case, I think the second answer concerning 'what happens' is
where the real potential of the project lies. That is, these intense
interactions between various persons (some operating from the side of
fiction and some operating from the side of reality but somehow coming
together to create a world between the two) was the real point and the
moment at which I was taken aback at the brilliance of the project.
Also, I was interested in what the project was able to do for some of
the tourists. That is, sometimes through fiction, we're able to interact
with one another more naturally than we would in the real world (just
think about the popularity of 'games' like "Second Life" or "World of
Warcraft" for example). Stories and rumors abound that tourists in Ruby
Town opened up their closets and revealed their most private details as
if they were sitting on the analyst's couch. Ruby Town, the ultimate act
of catharsis, Ruby Town as the confessional. Thus, theater here is like
Artaud would have it: a place for the theatergoer to purge himself of
his demons and let them flow. Again, amazing.

The question for the audience member, then, isn't whether you liked the
world but rather how far into the world were you willing to throw
yourself. But how far you were willing to throw yourself depended, I
believe, on another larger question. That is, is it necessary to enjoy
the experience and the aesthetic in order to be able to throw yourself
into the experience?

Personally, I think enjoying the world was a prerequisite for being able
to immerse yourself in it. For, even when I tried to ignore all the
cliches, I still found myself cringing when actors explained their
yellow papered stories and demonstrated mere representations of emotion
rather than real emotion. I felt like I was watching porn at some
moments, not because of the sexual nature of some of the rituals but
because I felt lie I was watching a cheap imitation of a cheap imitation
of emotion. As such, fiction remained fiction for the actors. That is,
whereas we were asked to ditch reality, it didn't seem to me that many
of the actors really immersed themselves in the fiction until it became
their reality. Indeed, it seemed to me they were still trying to make
sense of the thing and this might account for why they harped on all the
information surrounding Martha but when asked difficult questions, they
simply floundered.

I think SIGNA could have taken its roots in video games a little more
seriously, in that, in video games, you don't learn everything from one
character and one character only. Rather, you have to talk to the
wizards, the dwarves and the witches to get somewhere and only so can
the game progress. Instead, many of the characters repeated themselves
even after I told them I knew that Joel was getting married, and that
Joel had been married once before, etc. etc. It would have been more
interesting if I had to discover these details rather than feeling
inundated with the same information at every interaction (that is,
unless it was their point to drive me out weighed down by so much
mindless chatter and boredom).

I think it would have been really interesting, too, if they fostered
more interaction between the visitors to see how they react having to
make up their own fictions in the fictional world of Ruby Town. On a
side note, it seemed most tourists didn't want to interact with the
other tourists (also true of traveling, just see the blog Stuff White
People Like) but they wanted the authentic experience. While SIGNA
certainly exploited this desire of the audience, it would have been more
interesting if they would have frustrated it. After all, when tourists
go to a tourist restaurant in Las Ramblas, it's simply not the case that
they're hanging out with the people who live there (even after their day
of tromping around Barcelona thinking they're pioneers).

But again, this all has to do with my experience and I admit there's
plenty I didn't perceive or know about and thus, I'm willing to admit I
might be wrong about certain aspects, that my spectral glasses may have
malfunctioned.

No matter how you slice it, SIGNA should be applauded for the ambition
and scope of the project. They should be applauded for all their
successes and for all the actors that were really good and made the
experience enjoyable. They should be applauded for making me think and
talk and want to know more about the production, weeks after the
production was over. As any theatergoer knows, that doesn't happen very
often.

*Bravo SIGNA!*