O n a chilly January night in Toronto a couple of years ago, I brought my mother and girlfriend to a Shen Yun performance at the Sony Centre for the Performing Arts, a 3,seat theatre that generally hosts travelling orchestras and Josh Groban concerts. I had invited my mother along because I thought she might be interested in this particular take on Chinese culture.
Her mother, Gar Yin Hune, was a Chinese opera singer who came to Canada in the s as part of a travelling show designed to bring eastern art to the people of North America, particularly to the immigrants working in Chinatowns across the continent. The show began with the sound of a gong, as the curtain rose on a wall of dry ice that slowly dispersed to reveal dozens of dancers in brightly coloured, flowing costumes. What followed over the next two hours was a parade of unconnected Chinese dances that jumped from region to region and story to story.
There were vignettes from the classic folk tale The Monkey King and dances from Mongolia and Tibet, all performed with impressive athleticism and precision, in front of a projected backdrop that whirled through animated images that looked like scenes from a video game. Between each dance, two Masters of Ceremony emerged from stage right to perform some stilted patter — a strong-jawed Caucasian man in a tuxedo traded scripted jibes in impressive Mandarin with a pretty Chinese woman in a pink silk dress.
At the end of the first act, the MCs took to the stage to announce yet another routine. The curtain rose on a group of young students sitting in peace, meditating and reading oversized yellow Falun Gong books. The dancers performed elaborately pantomimed good deeds — helping an old woman with a cane, chasing down a woman who had dropped her purse. But when one unveiled a Falun Gong banner, suddenly a trio of men wearing black tunics emblazoned with a red hammer-and-sickle entered.
The communist thugs began beating people up, clubbing and kicking innocent Falun Gong followers. In the melee, one of the attackers twisted his ankle and fell to the ground. A Falun Gong practitioner tried to help his injured foe, lifting him up and carrying him on his back while the villain continued raining punches on him.
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The young Falun Gong practitioners gave him their book. The reformed thug pirouetted around the stage. Everyone sat and meditated together, and suddenly the backdrop exploded into a kaleidoscope of colourful animations — monks descending from heaven, women in dresses swirling around, enacting a kind of orgy of celestial joy, presumably meant to mirror the inner ecstasy of spiritual enlightenment. He ran, he leapt, and then the cast pointed to the screen, and to the final image of a man, meditating and beatific, at peace with the universe.
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The lights came up for intermission and we wandered out into the lobby, blinking and dazed. Outside, a young woman with an audio recorder was cornering patrons and asking for their reactions. The next day, the headlines spoke for themselves: The dozen articles were all published in the Epoch Times, a Falun Gong-affiliated newspaper. S ince its inception, Shen Yun has gone out of its way to minimise its connection to Falun Gong.
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In the posters designed to attract the culture lovers of Berlin or London, the performers simply share an ancient artform. Despite the constant touring and the need to promote the show, the group rarely grants interviews. The real story of Shen Yun, however, begins as a story of religious repression.
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Falun Gong stood out from the many other forms of qigong for a couple of reasons. Second, by the late 90s it was becoming remarkably popular, with an estimated 70 million practitioners, including high-level members of the Communist party.
To the Chinese government, the fact that a quasi-religious organisation stubbornly outside party control could inspire huge numbers of people to action was reason for concern. The seemingly harmless sight of middle-aged people exercising in the park began to look like a threat. Li fled China, and in became a permanent resident of the US, where he has been based ever since. In China, the government began to crack down. On 25 April , more than 10, Falun Gong practitioners quietly gathered in Beijing to demand an end to government harassment.
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It was the largest protest since those in Tiananmen Square in , and the Chinese government responded with a harsh crackdown. During this crisis, Li disappeared from the public eye for nearly a year, leaving followers struggling to figure out how to respond to their new position as political pariahs. When Li reemerged, says Andrew Junker, a sociologist at Valparaiso University who has written extensively about Falun Gong, it was with a new message. In a much-circulated interview with Time magazine in , Li talked about Falun Gong followers having the power to levitate, and spoke at length about an extraterrestrial invasion.
With this shift in rhetoric, Li also reinforced his position as leader. Out of this crisis, a new version of Falun Gong emerged. This meant, in theory, to try to correct the misinformation that was emerging from the Chinese government. David Ownby, a professor at the University of Montreal and the author of Falun Gong and the Future of China, says that the Falun Gong practitioners who arrived in North America in the early s had been far from political.
Falun Gong followers formed media groups such as the Epoch Times and New Tang Dynasty Television, which are critical of the Chinese Communist party and have become key partners in pro-democracy movements.
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The Chinese government kind of freaked out. During this time, at the turn of the century, you saw hundreds of Falun Gong practitioners protesting in the streets, sitting outside Chinese consulates and passing out pamphlets. There were sympathetic articles in mainstream newspapers documenting their persecution. But what followed this flurry of media attention was inevitable: The facts on the ground — that Falun Gong practitioners have been persecuted, imprisoned and killed — remain as true as ever.
But western sympathies have shifted. As China has grown in power, human rights abuses have become increasingly overlooked. But it is strange. Falun Gong has moralistic, socially conservative beliefs, preaching against homosexuality and sex out of wedlock. The group is secretive, and has a tendency to exaggerate and distort. For years, the Epoch Times has claimed that hundreds of millions of people have renounced the Chinese Communist party, relying on numbers that are impossible to verify.
All of this has made them feel alien and less than sympathetic to the liberal westerners who would be their natural allies.
It is in this context — with Falun Gong persecuted in China, and treated increasingly warily in the west — that Shen Yun emerged. Since , Li has delivered long speeches to Falun Gong practitioners at international conferences.
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The speeches are part state-of-the-union, part papal address, a curious mixture of the mundane and the spiritual. They are collected at Minghui. The speeches veer from moments of folksy, pragmatic advice to warnings about apocalyptic forces. Li also speaks again and again about his desire to change the world, and his homeland in particular, through the power of Shen Yun. It distressed him to see his spiritual practice represented by such mediocre art. So the Master stepped in. Haya rated it liked it Jan 02, Dina rated it really liked it Dec 08, Adham deabes rated it liked it Nov 20, Mohamed Moussa rated it really liked it Nov 24, Pt Ghonojka rated it it was ok Dec 24, Mohamed Ershi rated it really liked it Jan 28, Khaled Abd albari rated it liked it Dec 13, Najla Al rated it liked it Oct 09, Fereshteh rated it really liked it Aug 06, Bintnoor rated it really liked it Jan 10, Shelly rated it it was amazing May 12, Amacom added it Mar 01, Hend Osama marked it as to-read May 06, Yaser marked it as to-read Dec 02, Mohammed Al-mishaal is currently reading it Mar 22, Justin marked it as to-read Sep 03, Aisha marked it as to-read Dec 17, Nour marked it as to-read Feb 02, Areej marked it as to-read Mar 11, Rabab Newair is currently reading it Apr 03, Lana marked it as to-read Apr 14, Aya Abbas Morsi marked it as to-read Oct 22, Amjed marked it as to-read Jan 01, Ravi marked it as to-read May 16, Doaa Abo hatab is currently reading it Mar 23, Jj marked it as to-read Apr 09, C marked it as to-read Apr 17, Birgit Kanter is currently reading it Oct 01, Norah Al O marked it as to-read Jun 17, Lukasz added it Feb 07, Yousra Helmy marked it as to-read Apr 18, Rawoyo Abdurrouf marked it as to-read May 17, Sara Go marked it as to-read Jun 19, Tahany marked it as to-read Aug 23, Nano Nour Al-Din marked it as to-read Oct 15, Othman Alakari marked it as to-read Feb 26, Heba added it Mar 05, There are no discussion topics on this book yet.