Dreamthinkspeak to Stage New Production of ABSENT OPENING at Shoreditch Town Hall

Tristan Sharps and dreamthinkspeak today announce the opening of their new piece Absent which will be staged at Shoreditch Town Hall from 24 August to 25 October with press performances on 1 and 2 September.

An intimate promenade installation inspired by The Duchess of Argyll's residence at a central London hotel in the 1970's.

A young woman enters a hotel. She is magnetic and compelling, yet strangely detached, as if in a dream. She books for one night and remains for a lifetime; she's happy and optimistic, yet unfathomably sad; she is wealthy and ostentatious, but bankrupt and survives on credit; she is beautiful, yet ugly; she has many lovers, but loves no one; she is 18 years old - or is she 80?

The Duchess of Argyll booked into a central London hotel in 1978 and was ejected several years later, having finally run out of friends and credit. In Absent, she is surreally re-imagined entering a hotel as an optimistic 18 year-old in the 1950's and being evicted in the present day, into a modernised and radically changed world.

Absent will create an intimate journey for audiences through the maze-like basement of Shoreditch Town Hall, mixing film and architectural installation with a haunting soundtrack. As you thread your way through the labyrinthine passageways, you become enmeshed in a constantly shifting dreamscape in which the past, present and future of both the protagonist and the hotel become inextricably linked.

Margaret of Argyll, born Ethel Margaret Whigham was a well-known socialite, whose colourful public image made her a tabloid target in the middle of the last century.

Tristan Sharps trained at Jacques Lecoq in Paris and has worked as a theatre maker for nearly 30 years. He has been creating large-scale site-specific work since 1995, when he co-created 2000, transforming the Union Chapel in London into the fictional world of Roulettenburg Casino.

He formed dreamthinkspeak in Brighton in 1999, creating projects for over 30 different sites and leading the company to international recognition as a key practitioner of site-responsive performance. His work interweaves live performance with film and installations to create extraordinary journeys that are ambitious in scale, visually layered and popular with audiences wherever they are performed.

Previous works have taken place in a variety of physical and architectural contexts from an underground abattoir in Clerkenwell, to a disused paper factory in Moscow to the vast Zuidas office complex in Amsterdam. Key productions include Who Goes There? (2001), Don't Look Back (2003), Underground (2005), Before I Sleep (2010), The Rest Is Silence (2012), In The Beginning Was The End (2013) andOne Day, Maybe (2013).

Lapalux has collaborated with Sharps on Absent to compose the soundscape. Stuart Howard, also known as Lapalux, is an Essex born music producer currently signed with Brainfeeder records. His most recent album Lustmore was released earlier this year and previous album credits include Late Night Tales (2013), Nostalchic (2013) When You're Gone (2012), Many Faces Out of Focus (2012) and Some Other Time (2012).

Absent is a major out of festival initiative for LIFT by their Associated Artist dreamthinkspeak, enabled with the significant support of LeftCoast and Shoreditch Town Hall.

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