By cheating Chinese dance Thousand-hand Bodhisattva, Shen Yun dancers rehearsing for a 2016 performance in Long Beach, California. Scott Varley/Digital First Media/Torrance Daily Breeze via Getty Images
If you watch any TV or are online, you’ve probably seen ads for the dance troupe Shen Yun.I didn’t know anything about it, but I was intrigued, and they were performing at the Merrill Auditorium in Portland, ME yesterday, so I bought tickets and my other half & I went for the afternoon performance.
My husband & I both love to see ethnic performances so this, to me, fit the bill. We settled back into our balcony seats for a delightful afternoon.
I hadn’t researched the group ahead of time, and I assumed it was a group out of China.
Then came a strange moment. The audience was whisked out of centuries-old depictions into discredit China. It was then I started to feel that this troupe wasn’t what they advertised themselves to be.
And then a Chinese baritone came out and sang a number which was translated in English on the screen. The words were critical of the Chinese government. I thought, “okay, well they have a platform behind this”.
After intermission, there were several more acts, emphasizing that evolution is wrong. This is wrong about how we live and believe. That is wrong. Again, translations on the screen, that described the only path to save our human race is to follow “The Way”. (wait…what???).
It finally dawned on me (guess I was a little slow) that this whole show is pure propaganda.
After we returned home, I did a little research into Shen Yun. They are an outreach performance group for the Chinese religious cult, Falun Gong. And Falun Gong publishes the Epoch Times, a conspiracy-laden newspaper that’s ubiquitous in its outreach through print and also their own online broadcast channel. I wish I did my research ahead of time, but I was lured in by the amazing athletics & the ideal that I was going to see an ethnic troupe out of China. Not a troupe promoted by a cult.
“The New Yorker’s Jia Tolentino describes it as “religious-political propaganda … an extremely elaborate commercial for Falun Dafa’s spiritual teachings and its plight vis-à-vis China.” And Business Insider describes is this way: “But Shen Yun, as it turns out, isn’t just a dance show. It’s also part of an elaborate messaging strategy for Falun Gong — also known as Falun Dafa — a Chinese religious and political group persecuted within China that opposes the country’s ruling party.”
If you plan on seeing them perform, you might want to read this first. Wish I had…I wouldn’t have made them a couple hundred dollars richer.
Source Link: https://medium.com/@nancywhitecassidy/we-saw-a-shen-yun-performance-yesterday-e609d14e53e2
