Stepping into the Uncanny, Unsettling World of Shen Yun

Aside from the organ harvesting, the homophobia, the anti-evolution ballad, and the Karl Marx apparition, the thing I found most odd about my Shen Yun experience in Houston was the hosts’ explanation of Chinese classical dance. “I studied Chinese classical dance at the Beijing Dance Academy for a year and a half,” she said, “and, a few weeks after I came back to Michigan, a group promoting Shen Yun came up to me at the mall, handed me a flyer, and gave me the whole spiel about how Chinese dance is banned in China. In the book “Contemporary Directions in Asian-American Dance,” Yutian Wong notes that the glowing profiles Shen Yun publishes about its dancers “consist of stories in which former Chinese nationals can only discover the essence of Chinese culture by learning and performing classical Chinese dance choreography outside of the People’s Republic of China.”

Source: www.newyorker.com