The Ubiquitous Shen Yun

Written By wisteria magazine

By Logan Yuhas, Wisteria Magazine

Author’s Note: Any similarities in narrative structure to Jia Tolentino’s New Yorker article “Stepping Into the Uncanny Unsettling World of Shen Yun” are purely coincidental. I had already come up with my outline before reading that article; I highly suggest reading hers if you are interested because she is the professional!

The ads are everywhere. I see the leaping young woman that acts as their default logo in about every public space I enter: she’s smiling at me in Jimmy John’s, in the junk mail, on a highway billboard, from the inside of a trash can. It is rare that I leave the house and don’t see her frozen-in-time jump accompanied by showtimes near me. For my friends and I, as I feel like it’s become for other suburbanite Americans, it has become a shoo-in joke for any kind of entertainment hoax. 

I went to the show with one such friend, Fifi, after a couple of years of tossing around the idea, and let me tell you: it was mid as all hell. Personal opinions aside, it was a real show, with real coordinated dancers, an orchestra (conducted by a woman! – which is actually quite a progressive scarcity), and a patented digital backdrop with imagery not unlike World of Warcraft or Sims 3. A little bit of a snoozefest, with heavy reliance on ever-so-vague “traditional Chinese ethnic dances”, with annoying bilingual hosts that feel the need to introduce each new scene with sad attempts at humor. For a total of seventeen sub-ten-minute scenes and three live soloists, it’s up to you to decide if it’s worth the price. The costumes were pretty wonderful, though. The detail that stood out to Fifi, however, was the titanic “no photos allowed” projection onto the curtains before each of the two acts, with ushers lining every row to enforce it. Why such secrecy? It wasn’t to protect their intellectual property, no matter how pricey the tickets were. It’s because Shen Yun is a cult.

Or rather, its message promoting Falun Dafa. Melding the trans-Eurasian history of doomsday religious sects and the East Asian doctrines of inner spirituality, namely Tai Chi and Qigong, it developed and blossomed in the 90s in response to the Tiananmen Square Massacre and general Chino-Communist suppression at a height of 70-100 million adherents by the dawn of the 21st Century, outnumbering the Communist Party membership of the same time. They are genuinely abused in Mainland China, although the rumors of back-and-forth organ harvesting between the two remain unproven propaganda. Now they have found refuge in Taiwan and the Hudson River Valley, though there are many groups across the world. 

Their sacred text is the Zhuan Falun, written by the founder, Hongzhi Li, that expounds an “ancient Chinese spiritual discipline” and “five gentle exercises” on its “universal principles of Truthfulness, Compassion, and Forbearance” as one of the many free, full-color pamphlets provided by the performance informed me. Li acts not only as the apostles, but as a messiah whose ‘law bodies’ follow humans around, cosmically scrutinizing their every action. Beyond that, Li has scorned modern medicine, Communism and welfare, homosexuality, and evolution while arguing that the end of the world is fast approaching its reckoning, that “the races” will be separated in heaven, and that society is being controlled by “modern thought” disseminated by aliens. More contemporarily, their news outlet Epoch Times has become an above-the-radar conservative think tank promoting Trumpism at large. Some claim their almost irreparably hysterical teachings have driven members to suicide, at least at the hands of denying medical treatment to receive God’s judgment.

The dance itself isn’t anything “traditional” or “authentic” either, despite being heralded as the foundations for contemporary ballet and gymnastics. Rather it is a facet of the broad, self-defined Chinese dance movement created as a unique and decidedly modern nationalist cultural intrigue. And, according to the scholar Emily Wilcox, Shen Yun shares little in common with these Modern forebears, trading in nuanced and complicated movement inspired by China’s past and present for simple, if not physically demanding, showstopping grandeur, meant for a Western audience. With lots of repetition - one dancer performed the same trick maybe fifty times before moving on. If you saw something cool once in Shen Yun, you were going to see it again.

As Fifi and I felt like falling asleep, the show brought in its final scene. It was one of the two scenes set in contemporary China, featuring innocent Falun Dafa members arrested by figures in black cloaks emblazoned with upside-down hammers and sickles, on the premise of China’s Zero-COVID policy. All this occurred as teenagers set up ring lights filming TikTok “get-ready-with-me’s” and Orange Justice, yes like the Fortnite dance, to which Fifi and I could not stop laughing. As the performers vacated into their fake quarantine, an impossibly massive tsunami swept the nondescript Chinese city, a standard ending for all Shen Yun performances. As the skyline was destroyed however, the Falun Dafa adherents from earlier faced the deserted streets of COVID-era China to not only stop the wave but ascend to heaven, a wink-and-nod to their belief that fellow COVID-denier Donald Trump is an angel sent from heaven. It all seemed a little too neon, a little too direct, a little too overwrought and romantic for us to take the troupe seriously. But serious is what Shen Yun was, and continues to be, despite anything that has come its way. The only thing missing from our performance–something I had been looking forward to based on my limited social media journey on the dance–was a giant Karl Marx getting beheaded. I guess they learned how much is too ludicrous, even for America.

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