Mr. Matas said, “First of all, I’d never seen before, although I have seen performances before, the interplay between the video background and the players, where dancers just walked out of the video background and became dancers on the stage. It’s a technological development, which, to me, was amazing.
"And of course, there’s the athletic agility, the dancers, the beauty of the presentation, the combination of classical orchestra with the specific Chinese instrument, which I’ve never seen or heard anywhere else. ”
Mr. Matas has spent decades investigating the Chinese Communist Party’s human rights abuses, including the forced organ harvesting of Falun Gong practitioners in China.
Mr. Matas said, “I mean, some of the dances are just that, but some of them do provide a storyline, and it’s an interesting way of telling the stories through dance alone, and including one which was, of course, striking to me, is the storyline about persecution of Falun Gong and the organ harvesting.
"As I was saying before, it gives you an opportunity through dance to say things and communicate to an audience. Basically, doing what dancers normally do. So it shows you the inventiveness of the different ways of communicating the problem and how to deal with it.
"It’s been seen around the world many times. It’s an amazing accomplishment, and it makes you see what the Chinese country and citizenship have lost, by losing their traditional culture and repressing really what is one of their most successful, successful descendants or presenters of Chinese culture and history. ”
Mr. Matas said that beyond attending the performance, it is critical to push back against the Chinese Communist Party’s efforts to undermine traditional Chinese culture.
“It’s important to support it. But I would also say even more important is to combat the transnational repression against it, because what we see is the Chinese Communist Party has identified Falun Gong as its most prominent opposition force and the most one of the very important vehicles for that is Shen Yun, because it’s seen by so many people.
"And the Chinese Communist Party has engaged in transnational repression, specifically against Shen Yun because of its communicative value, with bomb threats, with planted newspaper stories, and slashing tires and threatening people, threatening advertisers to get them to withdraw ads, threatening employees not to come to the performance, and so on. And I think that it’s an indication of not only how effective it is, but how important it is.”
