Bernie DeKoven, funsmith

All around the world, people are complaining. And they're doing it beautifully. Thanks to the orchestrated Finnish humor of Tellervo Kalleinen and Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen, the Complaints Choir phenomenon is sweeping the known universe.

"As complaining is a universal phenomenon the project could be organised in any city around the world. Kalleinen and Kochta-Kalleinen offered the concept to different events where they were invited as artists – but it was only after Springhill Institute in Birmingham got excited about the idea that the First Complaints Choir became a reality...Kalleinen and Kochta-Kalleinen have facilitated Complaints Choir workshops in Helsinki, St. Petersburg, Hamburg-Wilhelmsburg, Chicago, Singapore and Copenhagen. They have documented all the performances and they are presenting the videos as a powerful video installation in art exhibitions as well as in this web site. Since the succes of the Brimingham Complaints Choir on YouTube they have been receiving numerous letters where people describe how exactly in Hong Kong, Philadelphia, Gothenburg, or Buenos Aires people complain perhaps more than anywhere else in the world and therefore need an own complaints choir. The limited capacity of Kalleinen & Kochta-Kalleinen to fulfil the apparent big need for complaints choirs worldwide have led them to open this web site and encourage people to form their own complaints choir."

There is magic, here. Humor. Yet another flavor of fun, even. Transforming the endless need to complain - sometimes for profoundly legitimate reasons, sometimes for the sheer sake of complaining - into an art form. Something transcending. Something healing. Something significantly silly. Something coming to a theater near you.