Shen Yun, the touring dance and music production that stopped at Cobb Energy Centre last weekend, has left a choppy wake of controversy on other stops on its never-ending tour, charged with propagandizing for the Falun Gong religious movement.
But metro Atlantans attending the final of four performances, on Sunday afternoon, seemed not to mind the political proselytizing, which at times during the two-hour-plus show was as subtle as a taser shot to the noggin.
The mention of taser isn't random. In the second of two segments in which Chinese authorities are shown brutalizing citizens, a lone man is tasered in Tiananmen Square. But wait: Because of his "Astounding Conviction," the segment's title, divine beings come to the beaten-but-not-broken man's aid. And at the piece's end, his yellow Chinese protest sign is translated in super-titles above the stage, in case anyone was confused about the moral: "Falan Dafa Is Good."
The segment was actually less upsetting than the earlier violent one, when Chinese police repeatedly attack a mother and her young daughter performing Falun Dafa exercises in a park.
Such scenes have caused some audience members in other cities to exit early, and critics, such as the Daily Telegraph of London's, to dub the show "propaganda as entertainment."
The main rub has been that Shen Yun's advertising and advance publicity materials do not mention the political subtext, and that audiences shouldn't have to pay as much as $120 a ticket to be evangelized to. On thousands of brochures distributed across metro Atlanta, no mention of Falun Gong, a spiritual practice of exercise and meditation that is banned in China, is made.
The brochure cover's benign tagline: "Enter a world of beauty and awe."
Still, Atlantans interviewed at Cobb Energy on Sunday cut Shen Yun slack.
"If I'm going to see a show from another culture, I don't expect to see the Passion play," Atlantan Brian Cox said. "I expect to see a Chinese thing."
Cox, a private contractor for the U.S. government, continued: "Plus, propaganda is everywhere. You even have that at football games."
Maronda Hastie, a DeKalb County teacher, said she was unaware of the turmoil in China, adding, "It's something I want to research." Told about the criticism at other tour stops, she said, "I don't think it's offensive; it's inspirational."
D.J. Arnott, who attended what she figured would be an educational outing with her husband and two home-schooled daughters, ages 10 and 15, said she didn't expect the show to be so political, but that was OK.
"It is reality," the Milton mom said of China's political and religious suppression. "Unfortunately, we in the U.S. are very sheltered from what's experienced in other countries."
Atlantans Dan Franklin and Margaret Whitten, who saw the show last year, were far less forgiving.
"Far be it from [us] to defend the Communist Chinese government, but I do think we were 'sold' a bill of goods," they wrote in an e-mail to the AJC. "Whether or not the Chinese government is maltreating the Falun Gong, we deserved to be told that we were [paying] for the purpose of being indoctrinated into the philosophy and the plight of the Falun Gong."
Shen Yun's local publicist Sigele Winbush responded that the content was not "overwhelming or offensive."
She also e-mailed the mission statements of New York-based Shen Yun Performing Arts and local presenter New Times Culture. Neither mentioned Falun Gong.
(The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, January 17, 2010)
