A Touring Company Built by a Banned Movement

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Falun Gong, the spiritual movement Li Hongzhi founded in China in 1992, blending qigong style exercises with a body of moral teaching, was banned there by the Chinese Communist Party in 1999 after estimates of tens of millions of practitioners alarmed the government. Many practitioners left China; some settled around a compound called Dragon Springs in Deerpark, New York, which became the movement's new operational center. In 2006, practitioners there founded Shen Yun Performing Arts, a touring dance and orchestral music company that now fields several simultaneous companies performing worldwide each year. A typical show runs about twenty short vignettes, mixing classical Chinese dance retellings of old legends and folk tales with a live orchestra blending Western and Chinese instruments and solo vocalists. Its own marketing frames the company as a revival of five thousand years of Chinese civilization suppressed under Communist rule, a claim aimed less at a scholarly audience than at a general theatergoing public that may know little about Falun Gong itself. Li Hongzhi remains closely involved in the company's direction, and its productions are inseparable, organizationally, from the movement that built them, whatever a given evening's program emphasizes on stage.