Not an experience you’d want to repeat: Shen Yun, at the Eventim Apollo, reviewed

If you live in London, you may well have spotted Shen Yun’s enormous candy-coloured posters on the Underground, endorsed by puffs from authorities proclaiming the show to be ‘very, very on top’ and ‘an exemplary display of excellence’. This primitive advertising strategy seems to have worked: on the night I went, the Hammersmith Apollo (capacity around 3,500) was filled to the gills, the crowd made up of the same social mix that you might find at the Cirque du Soleil. What did any of us think we’d be getting?

I was more impressed by the speed of the costume changes than I was by anything that happened on stage

‘Shen Yun’, as the two robotically scripted compères informed us in front of the curtain, is Chinese for something along the lines of ‘the beauty of divine beings dancing’. Based in New York, it trains and operates eight troupes that tour globally, presenting a different programme every year – a model similar to the Holiday on Ice franchise ubiquitous in my youth. Behind it, unapologetically, is the ideology of the Falun Gong movement that mushroomed in China during the early 1990s. Its spread worried the communist regime, which now proscribes and persecutes its members. Falun Gong accuses the state of torture, arbitrary arrest and organ harvesting.

It has since spread to Chinese communities in Taiwan, Europe and the USA. At first glance it can look harmless enough – a spiritual practice focused on ‘truthfulness, compassion and forbearance’, syncretic of Buddhism, Daoism and Christianity, and having no truck with violence. But there may be a dash of Scientology in there too, and in exile its political alignment has veered far right towards QAnon fantasies as well as extremely narrow attitudes to sexuality.