Shen Yun

We had a substantial flyer through our door this afternoon, sixteen sides of full colour. The sort of paper you get in cheap magazines and catalogues, but the unusual size of 18cm by 30cm, no relation of the A4 and its friends that we use. I dare say the Europeans use this last too, so maybe its on the Tory checklist of things to be got rid of.

A flyer advertising the Shen Yun dance and music operation, due to put on shows in London and Birmingham at the end of February. The London venue is a place presently called the Eventim Apollo, once the Gaumont Palace cinema, built in 1932 in art deco. It still looks to seat thousands of people and the heritage people insisted that the large and ancient cinema organ be restored and reinstated. See reference 1.

A flyer which makes a point of telling us how terrible the current regime in China is, with a whiff of Falun Gong about it.

Off to Bing, to find that it is indeed a branch of the complicated Falun Gong empire, headquartered in the backwoods of New York State at a place called Deerpark, not to be confused with the one on Long Island. According to one report: 'Both Shen Yun and Epoch Times are funded and operated by members of Falun Gong, a controversial spiritual group that was banned by China's government in 1999 ... Falun Gong melds traditional Taoist principles with occasionally bizarre pronouncements from its Chinese-born founder and leader, Li Hongzhi. Among other pronouncements, Li has claimed that aliens started invading human minds in the beginning of the 20th century, leading to mass corruption and the invention of computers. He has also denounced feminism and homosexuality and claimed he can walk through walls and levitate. But the central tenet of the group's wide-ranging belief system is its fierce opposition to communism'.

Not very keen on evolution or atheists either. And I dare say that they are anti-vaxers. And obviously dodgy as they don't allow the Street View camera van into their site.

But where does all the money come from? How do they make so much money out of song and dance, a trick that not many others seem to manage?

References

Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hammersmith_Apollo.

Reference 2: for the HQ, ask gmaps for 41.4480412, -74.5904812.

Reference 3: https://www.shenyun.com/.

Reference 4: https://www.shenyunperformingarts.org/.

Reference 5: http://dragonsprings.org/.