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MediaFebruary 21, 2020

What is Shen Yun and why do I keep seeing those ads everywhere?

Contributing writer

‘A life-changing experience’, ‘The greatest of the great! It must be experienced!’, ‘That show with the dancing lady on the billboard.’ Shen Yun ads are impossible to avoid, but what on earth is it?

So what is Shen Yun?

According to the Shen Yun website: “It is a brilliant artistic revival and celebration of China’s rich cultural heritage … Each performance consists of about 20 pieces, quickly moving from one legend, region or dynasty to the next.”

According to the brochure, and many billboards that criss-cross the city, it is “5,000 years of civilization reborn”.

The actual Shen Yun Performing Arts Company was founded in New York in 2006, and is strongly associated with the Falun Gong (sometimes called Falun Dafa), a relatively new religious movement from China. There are seven touring companies, comprised of hundreds of performers (both musicians and dancers), who tour 130 cities a year annually. Their first performances in New Zealand took place in 2008. It’s one of the largest, most comprehensive touring shows in the world, rivalling the ubiquity of Cirque du Soleil.

But what is it?

Dance. It’s dance.

It’s also propaganda.

Wait, what?

The Falun Gong is a religious movement, founded in 1992 by Li Hongzhi, who remains its spiritual leader. Its practice combines meditation, exercises in the qigong martial art and teachings drawn from Taoist traditions. In an interview with Time Magazine, Li said Falun Gong adherents have the power to levitate, warns of a potential alien invasion and refuses to confirm if he’s human or not.

By the end of the 90s, Falun Gong numbered nearly 70 million practitioners in China and the Communist Party viewed it as a threat. After more than 10,000 adherents staged a protest, the Communist Party cracked down, blocking internet access to sites that mention Falun Gong, and declaring it a “heretical organisation that threatened social stability”.

Practitioners are reportedly persecuted, and human rights group estimate that at least 2,000 Falun Gong practitioners have died as a result of their abuse while in custody. Falun Gong practitioners have since become some of the most outspoken and active critics of the Beijing government.

But how does that relate to Shen Yun?

The company was established back in 2006 as a way for Li to change the world through the power of dance. When he spoke at the 2014 New York Fa Conference, he spoke of a few disciples involved in the arts who wanted to use art to change the world. After seeing them do their art thing, he found them mediocre and then decided that if dance was going to save the world, it needed to be top-notch. And thus, Shen Yun was born out of the Falun Gong.

Shen Yun is, unsurprisingly, banned in China. Chinese embassies across the world warn the public to stay away from a show they call “a tool of the cult and anti-China propaganda”.

On the back of their print brochure, the company states: “Traditional Chinese culture – with its deep spiritual roots and profound worldview – was displaced by Communism in China. While Shen Yun cannot perform in mainland China today, we are reviving this precious heritage and sharing it with the world.”

Despite the connection between Falun Gong and Shen Yun being very clear, it is downplayed in all the marketing material, being mentioned only once on their website and nowhere in their print material.

So it’s controversial.

Yeah, it’s not exactly STOMP.

Shen Yun caused a bit of a stir here back in 2013, when the Dominion Post reported that Wellington mayors and MPs had been invited to see the music show, with most saying they were unavailable that night. (It’s worth noting, maybe, that mayors and MPs being unavailable to attend a theatre or dance show is not in itself newsworthy. Ask any theatre producer, especially those with considerably less saturation than Shen Yun.)

Back in 2011, it caused a small amount of controversy in Auckland when the Chinese Consul General Liao Juhua sent Auckland council members a letter “kindly requesting” that they stay away from the performance. That news story was published by the Epoch Times, an international newspaper that is run by… the Falun Gong. The show’s producers claim that the Chinese state attempts to interfere with the show around the world.

If this show has been performed for more than ten years here, how come I am only hearing about it now?

Since its first appearance here in 2008, the company has heralded its upcoming performances with billboards, half-page ads in newspapers and primetime television ads. This year they appear to have ratcheted up the ad spend dramatically. There’s been a mail drop campaign featuring full-colour, double-sided, fold-out brochures that do not come cheap, and it’s very likely you’re seeing the show pop up all over your social media feeds. I guess they can afford it, though. According to Insider, the organisation made $22.5 million in 2016.

There’s also been increased scrutiny and coverage of the production in the past few years, including Jia Tolentino’s definitive piece in the New Yorker, and a popular meme last year which featured the ubiquitous Shen Yun dancer and billboard in places like Mars, the Blade Runner universe, and the titular billboards from Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.

How do they afford this?

There’s the rub. In each of the 130 cities that Shen Yun visits yearly, the shows are “presented” (read: funded) by the local Falun Gong association, as reported in this excellent Guardian article. The followers in each city raise the necessary funds and provide the publicity to make the show successful. In return, the volunteers get a few tickets to the show. So all those ads, all that marketing, all those direct-to-recycling brochures? Yup, they’re probably funded by the same people you see exercising in Aotea Square on a Saturday morning, and handing out fliers about persecution.

It appears that marketing works. Despite tickets to the show costing anywhere from $112 to $269 for its 2020 Auckland season, at least one of those shows is close to selling out as of this writing, and the show as a whole, ostensbily at least, makes enough money to tour seven companies around the world seemingly constantly.

But is it any good?

I haven’t seen it, but it probably depends on your tolerance for dance and propaganda, which as far as I’m concerned is a cursed peanut butter and chocolate kind of a mixture.

You can see Shen Yun from February 27 – March 1 at the Kiri Te Kanawa Theatre, Aotea Centre.

Keep going!

David Suchet as Hercule Poirot. Images: Porfirio Domingues / Supplied

MediaFebruary 19, 2020

Review: High in the gods for David Suchet – Poirot and More

Linda Burgess

Contributing writer

David Suchet as Hercule Poirot. Images: Porfirio Domingues / Supplied

Linda Burgess climbs the eternal staircase at the Opera House in Wellington to watch the virtuoso actor. At the interval her legs are aching. But in the second half, magic happens.

There’s one person wearing a face mask, just the one, and it turns his face into a disposable nappy with two scared eyes above. His eyes roam the theatre. Oh hell, is he looking guilty? After interval he’s gone. Just his leaving makes me aware of a tickle in my throat. Oh God, I’m going to cough. Ahem ahem. I’m going to cough and if I do, this mixed group of Wellingtonians and people who’ve come in from the hinterland – well, they could turn, I could be like Simon from Lord of the Flies as they swoop on me in their gold sandals, floral frocks and quirky skirts and hunt the virus, kill the virus, slit its throat.

We’d bought our seats late, on a whim, we’d come in from the garden and driven down to Ticketek, crazy with the knowledge that we live in this city of culture and never go to anything except movies at 3pm on Sundays. We’re going to go to David Suchet – Poirot and More not because – well sort of because – he’s Poirot, but mostly because I saw him a few years back in a documentary about The Orient Express. I liked him. And that was enough for the madcap decision to visit Ticketek. I never expected Robert to agree.

Expensive seats, even though they were up in the gallery, because it was pretty much sold out. The gods, it used to be called, and if I’d remembered that I could well have just continued looking to see if the hydrangeas needed deadheading rather than getting in the car with our credit cards. My thighs will cringe for months at the memory of creeping down those steep steps without even a rail to hold on to. Given the paranoia about health and safety in Wellington, how has the Opera House got away with it? Aren’t several of those even slightly wobbly on their pins – as in, theatre goers in general – cartwheeling involuntarily down those steps on a weekly basis?

We make it to our seats, second row, and it’s hot up there. Oh God it’s hot. Those in the know have brought smart little fans with them, Japanese, Samoan, there’s quite a range. Those mad enough to buy the programmes that their kids are going to have to chuck in the recycling when they die, are using them to create a draught, but those of us too cheap to spend even another cent just sit remembering teaching in a prefab at Palmerston North Girls High in high summer, when our fringe stuck to our forehead and the back of our neck where hair met skin became unbearably damp and sticky.

There’s so little room, it’s economy class Air NZ without the free wine. We’re both quite compact people: how can anyone who’s not a hobbit bear it? There are empty seats behind us and at interval, I crawl on my hands and knees to get somewhere with some space, somewhere, anywhere, that is not directly behind the man with the big head. Ahhh. An aisle seat, I can stick my feet out on the stairs and get a tiny bit comfortable.

A killjoy by nature, I’ve liked the first half, sort of. The audience is thrumming with happy appreciation. I’m in competition with the man in front, murmuring the answers to Suchet’s semi-rhetorical questions in an obnoxiously know-it-all way. The person in the distance, who is Suchet, is quite a presence; he tells a great anecdote and he’s made me laugh, which is a good start. But amusing anecdotes do not an amazing evening make. At the interval we agree that if you compared home on comfy sofa, or in spacious seats at cinema, with being with the real deal, then…

But after the interval – long enough for those prepared to mount those steps to buy posh, enviable iceblocks – things change. My feet are up, which always helps, but best of all, Suchet turns the evening into something precious. He gives us what he was always going to: the “and more”. He moves beyond charming, chuckle-rousing tales of his mother and old dears from Sussex and how people can’t quite work out if Suchet and Poirot are the same person, and he puts himself to work. He gives us a masterclass in how an actor inhabits a role, abandons his own personality and takes on another. How to use a different voice from one’s own, how to use a different walk. He uses heavenly words like alliteration, onomatopoeia and iambic pentameter. He talks about how it’s all there in the script for the actor, if the writer is good enough. Especially if the writer is Shakespeare. He briefly goes bananas when he entreats the entire audience to go home and write, write, clearly unaware that in Wellington everyone already does. There he is, the perfect balance of natural talent, of skill, of insight, imagination and hard hard work.

He explains, he performs; he tells and he shows. He’s Macbeth at the death of his wife. He’s Caliban when his island’s invaded. He is the most majestic talent you could ever hope to see.

I feel sad, I say, that these days there are kids who’ll never do Shakespeare. Thanks to being an English teacher once, I know all those plays, I say, as if he needs to be told. We go back up those bloody awful steps, mentally rejoicing that we’ll never ever see them again, then it’s down, down, down all the stairs – how high we must’ve been! – with just the pressure of the bodies fore and aft holding us upright. Though not just the bodies fore and aft, but that happy floating feeling you get when you’ve had a damn fine time. Been in the presence of genius. Been, as it turns out, a total pushover. And, as a bonus, escaped being quarantined. Out the door, thank God, away from the flood of too many people and too much excited chatter and into the warm, muggy, wet-ish, windy-ish Wellington night.

David Suchet – Poirot and More is in Christchurch tonight and in Auckland on Saturday February 22.