Borderlands

The white of the first figure’s dress, gliding between trees against Dryburgh Abbey’s gravestones, is startling enough to stop you in your tracks. There is a reverence to her – head bowed, almost wheeling beneath her skirts. You're simultaneously drawn to her and repelled, stopped from going too close. As we walk, the changing vistas of arches and crumbled walls bring out more figures, all in the same billowing white.

This site-specific piece from Scotland’s Dudendance Theatre is deceptive in its visual simplicity, using that single blank colour—or absence of colour—to create an image that shape shifts against the landscape. Afterwards, you feel as if you remember all but can’t quite pin it down. Do these ghosts represent unclaimed territory, their unliveried smocks waiting to be painted in the colours of some conqueror? Are those giant white flags they hold up flags of surrender? Or an homage to those that have died?

The figures move at sepulchral pace around the grounds, sometimes to the polyphonic sound of the Andante Chamber Choir, sometimes to a soundtrack of modern day army comms recordings. The latter seems unnecessarily blunt; the images are clear enough in their allusions to war. Rarely showing their faces behind headgear that hints at both knights’ visors and maids’ bonnets, they sometimes lie down, but always rise again, back to their slow pacing. Even this doesn’t feel like a triumph but more of a spiritual condemnation; that they will go on, always walking this path of conflict and defence; that it is written into theirs (and our) history, and cannot be erased.