Oy to the World

We’ve always believed that “complaining”:http://heebmagazine.com/articles/view/85 is an art form and now we have a few more whiny voices behind us.

International “artists”:http://www.ykon.org/kochta-kalleinen/ Tellervo Kalleinen and Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen are asking Chicagoans to join the “Complaints Choir”:http://complaintschoir.org: to compose and sing kvetches on any subject.

All participating complainers will create a grand opus together over the course of five rehearsals, which they will then perform at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago during the Chicago Humanities Festival in November.

The idea for this project came from the Finnish expression “Valituskuoro,” which is used to describe the situation of many people complaining simultaneously (now you can succinctly describe the din at large family gatherings). In May 2005, the first Complaints Choir performance took place in Birmingham, England. Since then, Kalleinen and Kochta-Kalleinen have been invited to initiate Complaints Choirs in Helsinki, Hamburg, St. Petersburg and Singapore. In each city, the choirs complain both about universal annoyances as well as place-specific maladies. (In Helsinki they sang “Our ancestors could have picked a sunnier place to be.” In St. Petersburg, “I can’t travel without visas.” And in Birmingham they cried, “It’s too far away from the sea.”

In Chicago, it’ll probably be something like, “I can never get tickets to Oprah,” or “Why the hell is _ER_ still on the air?”

But if you want to participate in the first U.S. Complaints Choir, submit your complaints and register online at “SmogVeil.com”:http://www.smogveil.com or by emailing [email protected]_.

What do you think?

About The Author

One Response

Leave a Reply to venn99 Cancel Reply

Your email address will not be published.

This will close in 0 seconds