NEW YORK—Shen Yun Performing Arts will begin its 2013 seasons in Buenos Aires, Agentina, on Dec. 13, bringing with it the true beauty engendered by Chinese classical dance. Shen Yun’s dance companies, orchestras, and vocalists will then travel to cities around the United States and the world.
If you want to purchase a truly outstanding holiday gift for someone special then you’ll get two tickets to Shen Yun. One for that person and one for you.
I’ll explain. One country you won’t see Shen Yun in, ironically, is China. The officially atheist communist regime that shackles China has made Shen Yun an enemy of the state since Shen Yun embraces the Buddhist and Taoist spiritual traditions of China. Some of Shen Yun’s performers are practitioners of Falun Gong, the Buddhist meditation discipline, who have faced persecution in China.
Even outside China, communist embassy officials attempt to disrupt performances of Shen Yun and have succeeded in some Asian countries in having performances shut down.
Thus, a Shen Yun ticket is no mere show ticket. It is taking a stand with the good guys in a battle of ideas that is shaping our modern world—a world where blood-stained Chinese products fill our shelves and our American dollars line freedom-crushing communist pockets. When the Chinese communist regime inevitably falls, you want to be on the right side of history.
But, that isn’t all. A Shen Yun ticket is more than even that. It is your one way ticket into the next period of civilization. I’ll explain even more.
In the history of the Western world’s cultural and artistic development, the Renaissance period began with people perfecting the arts they had previously lost. They drew on newly discovered superior examples and inspiration from the ancient Greek and Roman civilizations. But, the changes of this period not only affected fine arts, they included the development of music, architecture, and literature. All these arts were also intertwined with government, academia, religion, and commerce.
Depending on which history textbook you are looking in, the periods of our civilization that would follow include the Baroque and Romantic periods, with changes being reflected in all areas of the arts and culture as well. These subsequent periods, like the Renaissance building on ancient Greek and Roman aesthetics, built on the aesthetics of the periods that preceded them.
This changed around 100 years ago, in the late 19th century, with the emergence of the Modern period of our civilization. People in both the East and West had grown tired of the corruption and excesses infesting monarchies and aristocracies as Western civilization proliferated via newly advanced technology during the Industrial Revolution.
The common people around the world naturally wanted to create a new egalitarian civilization, and touted what seemed like a promising idea: communism. Unfortunately, this also meant throwing out the cultural and artistic traditions that had been fostered up to that point. Values of technical perfection, clarity, pure beauty, and reverence for the divine that characterized the best of the arts were now associated with the old world and seen as something that needed to be thrown out and destroyed.
Born out this artistic and cultural genocide of classical arts was the creation of modern art, modern dance, modern literature, and modern aesthetics—much of which is constantly changing and hard to appreciate without a long tutorial on why it is considered aesthetically good and valuable today.
Meanwhile, the corruption and excesses to which human beings are prone have grown even worse in communist and communist-leaning governments, unchecked by a spirituality that maintains morality. The Soviets, the Chinese communist regime, and other communist regimes are responsible for hundreds of millions of unnatural deaths.
It is only a matter of time before people realize that classical arts are superior to what the Modern period has given us, and that the corruption and excesses of the human heart are best checked through spirituality regardless of what form of government is in place.
In a world shrunk to an incredibly tiny scope by technology, the new period of civilization unfolds with each performance of Shen Yun. You can find it in other places such as the Arts Renewal Center, Baroque musicians Les Arts Florissants, and the Society of Classical Poets, but nowhere else will you see such a powerful manifestation, where so many performers involved in this new Renaissance worldwide perform together at once despite brutal repression and persecution by the government of the world’s largest nation, China.
The word “Shen Yun,” as with most Chinese characters, has a rich meaning, but could be translated as “Divine Beauty.” Indeed, the new period of civilization we are entering is one where we rediscover the beauty of the arts as disconnected from human corruption and in tune with the divine and our own history. It will truly be a Shen Yun period. That’s worth buying a ticket for.