w. s. :

I attended Shen Yun two seasons ago with my then five-year-old child. Be forwarned -- Divine Entertainment, Shen Yun's parent company, is a thinly veiled arm of the Falun Gong group. This alone would not stop one from attending, accept that it is a purely propagandist piece, entirely unsuitable for young children, and they are completely untruthful and misleading about their content in all of their advertisements. It is amazing to me that they have done as well as they have so far at fooling people...including myself and my family.

 

Thomas C. :

I attended the San Jose performance this afternoon with my 4-year-old daughter. I wanted to WARN PARENTS about attending this with young children.

I was expecting this to be song and dance and lots of costumes, appropriate for families. While there was indeed much of that, a good part of the show was promoting Falun Gong. Several songs about religion. But more disturbing - a dance sequence about a father, mother and little girl being beaten up by the Chinese government and the mother being killed. I screen all the movies my daughter watches (we worried about her watching Bambi when she was younger because the mother got killed) - and I would have appreciated a warning from the host/hostess who introduce each act to say "this is not appropriate for young kids". There was a second dance sequence near the end of the show about a man holding up a "Falun Gong is Good" sign who also got beaten up on stage, which reminded my daughter of what she had seen before intermission. She talked a lot about the "bad people" on the way home (the people doing the beating up) which means it bothered her a great deal.

I would have appreciated the show sticking to classical Chinese dance and ethnic dances - which is what they promote - and keep the politics out of the show. I will not be going to another one of these shows. The tickets are expensive, you can see a lot of these performances done just as well on Chinese television, and then you know it is really family programming.

(Yelp.com, January 2010)

Original text from: http://www.yelp.com/events/san-jose-shen-yun-performing-arts-2