PMS LOUNGE - Huldigung eines Zustands (Charlotte Pfeifer)

We’re stuck right in the middle and it’s never going to end: the world is and remains a vale of tears. Enter into a hell of biology where hormones rage and the remaining eggs are counted. On the other hand: maybe we don’t have a premenstrual syndrome at all. What we have is a collection of different symptoms that no one really knows how to classify and which could just as easily be triggered by stress, working conditions, the day of the week or our families. The old question of exactly is so sick about the whole thing is, chicken or egg, leads away from the individual and becomes societal. The PMS team throws opens the interior and exterior gates of shame: somewhere in between installation, bar scenes and fine music, sometimes nothing happens due to nervousness. But that can’t be stopped, either, so: Party! Cocktails! Show! P!M!S!
The PMS Lounge team is made up of artists from the fields of music, visual art, performance and design who developed the piece together with director Charlotte Pfeifer. Everyone is on stage and goes through changing moods with the audience, root through studies and contradictory information and transform the term PMS over the course of the performance and thus also the condition. This production was presented at the 2018 Hauptsache Frei festival (Hamburg). 
The PMS Lounge was originally presented as a three-part series, always during the full moon, in the fall of 2017 at the Hamburg club Uebel & Gefährlich. The evening also contains several open rounds of discussion which take place in advance as well as various video work that can be seen on the YouTube channel PMS Lounge Hamburg.
“The PMS Lounge goes up and down, back and forth, the radical self-questioning is transferred to the audience and, on this night, it is always exactly the right space, both dramaturgically and literally: in this non-theater space, we as audience members are constantly asked to newly define our role. (…) A challenging evening, in the best sense of the word."

Excerpt from the statement by the jury for the 2018 Hauptsache Frei festival – consisting of Wilma Renfordt (Impulse Theater Festival), Kira Kirsch (brut Wien) and Falk Schreiber (culture journalist)