Shen Yun 2015

A banner from Shen Yun's web site

Tonight, I attended the Quad Cities performance of the Shen Yun performing arts tour at the Adler Theater. Shen Yun is a dance and orchestral organization dedicated to sharing Chinese culture and history with the world. I went to the performance with my Chinese class and teacher, and we were fortunate enough to get excellent seats in the second row of the upper level.

It was an amazing experience. The dancers (of which there were at least 16 female and 10 male) were always in perfect sync and had really brightly colored clothing, sometimes using sleeve- or ribbon-like things that fly around and look really neat. They changed outfits between dances, to fit the theme or specific ethnicity being represented.

Behind the stage was a wall on which images and animated video were projected to augment the story and setting. Sometimes they were just static images (which looked really nice), but many dances had video that "pushed" objects into the world. There was a short wall behind which dancers could hide and jump out when a virtual character in the animation was about to "exit" into the real world - it must have required amazing precision. In two dances, real-world objects were "applied" to the background to "cause" things to happen on it (like writing). That timing was pretty amazing.

There seemed to be a half-and-half mix of dances that tell a story from Chinese mythology and ethnic dances from a particular region of China. There were also three solo performances, two singers and one player of a two-stringed violin-like Chinese instrument.

An interesting thing to note is that the Shen Yun performances are banned in China. That's because they depict a particular form of meditation that the current Communist government wants to suppress, thereby throwing out the old and gaining complete control of the culture. In fact, two dances contained overt references to the Communist Party in a very negative light. (In the final dance, Communism caused a volcano to erupt and end the world.)

After the performance (which lasted two and a half stunning hours), I and my class were ambushed by news reporters asking us our opinion of the show. I attempted to express my impressedness, as did my classmate. As we were attempting to exit the vehicular deadlock in the parking complex, I saw some nuns leaving the theater. Hooray for cross-cultural experiences!