DOC REVIEW: The Complaint Choir

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DOC REVIEW: The Complaint Choir

POSTED: Thursday, February 17, 2011, 9:00 PM

Filed Under: Critical Mass | Movies

The Complaints Choir is a movement to compile gripes, grumbles and grievances and arrange them in a chorus. This is not a glorification of non-gratitude, but rather a philosophical and turns out a somewhat political demonstration which gets an assortment of different reactions as choirs are organized all around the world. The basic premise is that we don't process problems in a healthy way. We focus more on the problems and less on the improvements. Sometimes we keep this stuff bottled up and it manifests in psychological or physical distress. Other times, we complain too gratuitously and fall into less effective general attitudes, mistaking the relevance of a late train for that of the Stock Market crash. And indeed, part of the Complaint Choir's beauty is their juxtaposition of "I have a hangnail" with "I lost my job" woven into the fabric of the music to effectively illustrate the empirical values of different complaints made stylistically similar.

In the documentary, we see that the Complaints Choir doesn't always go smoothly. Singapore is one example where the government intervened, and you start to realize that the freedom to express our grievances is perhaps the freedom most heartily taken for granted by Western culture. But do we do use it to affect positive changes, or do we just keep the muckiness of our culture damp with a vague haze of discontent? The Complaint Choir was begot by Tellervo Kalleinen and Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen in Helsinki, Finland as a living pun (there's a Finnish phrase to describe lots of people complaining at once, "Valituskuoro," which literally translates to "chorus of complaints"). When it picked up notoriety in England, Complaint Choirs started sprouting up all around the world. We had one here in Philadel0phia in '08, organized by First Person Arts and Spector Projects. For more information, visit http://www.complaintschoir.org/

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