The New yorker

ust as it is impossible for me to articulate with any certainty the moment I entered adulthood or began to believe that human life on Earth would not last past the twenty-second century, I cannot tell you when I first became aware of Shen Yun. The most pervasive forms of local advertising often feel like this—like nursery rhymes or urban legends, or something implanted in your most tender consciousness by a social version of natural law. When Texans hear the name Jim Adler, their souls reply with “Texas Hammer.” Michiganders know that God filled the sky around the Detroit airport with clouds and with billboards for Joumana Kayrouz. New Yorkers know the Cellino & Barnes hotline better than they know their Social Security numbers. And, for many Americans who live in or around the ninety-six cities where the Shen Yun Performing Arts troupe is set to perform this year, the words “Shen Yun” conjure an indelible yet incomprehensible image: a flat, bright shade of lilac, a woman leaping in the sky with a fan-shaped white skirt and billowing pink sleeves, and the enigmatic phrase “5,000 Years of Civilization Reborn.”

Shen Yun has lived in the pink fluffy insulation of my mind for a while now. Last year, the ads were goldenrod yellow, like dehydrated urine, and they said “Reviving 5,000 Years of Civilization.” The year before that, the ads (“Experience a Divine Culture”) were green. The year before that, the Shen Yun poster featured two women dancing, wearing birthday-cake-frosting colors, and for months I sat in the subway reading but in no way processing the phrase “Absolutely the No. 1 show in the world.” These posters were so uncanny and contentless that the easiest explanation for their existence was that my brain had simply glitched and invented Shen Yun the way John Nash invented his roommate in “A Beautiful Mind.” Shen Yun was a Baader-Meinhof object: once I saw it, I started to see it everywhere. Shen Yun greeted me silently at the bus stop and loomed over highway exits, following me around on the physical plane of existence the way anything you shop for on the Internet starts to follow you around online.

Then, over the holidays, I went home to Houston, where my parents live. On Christmas Day, my dad told me that he had something special planned for the family. “It’s this show,” he said. “It’s supposed to be spectacular. It’s called Shen Yun.”

“What?!” I said.

“Mike and Lilly saw it,” my dad said. “They said it was beautiful.”

“It’s real?” I said. “What is it?”

“Oh,” my dad said. “It’s dancing. Beautiful . . . dancing. Really fabulous, traditional dancing.”

“Is it like Cirque du Soleil?” I asked, furiously Googling Shen Yun on my phone, something that had never occurred to me to do before. (Why look up a figment of your own imagination?) I was seeing a lot of search results that involved the word “cult.” I clicked on one link, and then closed it, realizing that I did not want to spoil what lay ahead of me—a free journey into the fantastic unknown.

On the day of Shen Yun, I developed chills and a fever, which I immediately decided to ignore in the interest of seeing Shen Yun. My family drove to the fancy concert hall downtown, where the lobby was full of people in suits and cocktail dresses. After we took our seats, two hosts with animatronic smiles, speaking both Chinese and English, began introducing a series of dances, which were called things like “Goodness in the Face of Evil” and “The World Divinely Restored.” The female dancers moved in hypnotic swirls; the male dancers jumped and flipped. Behind the stage was an enormous screen upon which digital backdrops—ancient temples, royal gardens, the cosmos—appeared, along with digital dancers who would walk to the bottom of the screen and then pop out, via the appearance of a living dancer, on the stage. The colors were near-neon and unnatural; they reminded me of the glowing hues of Photo Hunt, the tabletop bar game. The hosts started talking about a spiritual discipline called Falun Dafa, and then introduced a dance in which a beautiful young follower of Falun Dafa was kidnapped and imprisoned by Communists, who harvested her organs. “I’m hallucinating,” I whispered to my brother in the dark.

“Would everyone like to learn a little Chinese?” one of the hosts asked. He intoned a phrase and asked the audience to repeat it. “That phrase means ‘I love Shen Yun,’ ” he said.

I felt my forehead. The dances continued, sleeves swirling, skirts rippling. A man came onstage to sing a song in Chinese, which was translated on the screen behind him. “We follow Dafa, the Great Way,” he began, singing about a Creator who saved mankind and made the world anew. “Atheism and evolution are deadly ideas. Modern trends destroy what makes us human,” he sang. At the end of the song, the row of older white people sitting behind me clapped fervently. In the final dance number, a group of Falun Dafa followers, who wore blue and yellow and clutched books of religious teachings, battled for space in a public square with corrupt youth. (Their corruption was evident because they were wearing black, looking at their cell phones, and, in the case of two men, holding hands.) Chairman Mao appeared, and the sky turned black; the city in the digital backdrop was obliterated by an earthquake, then finished off by a Communist tsunami. A red hammer and sickle glowed in the center of the wave. Dazed, I rubbed my eyes and saw a huge, bearded face disappearing in the water.

“Was that . . . ?” I said to my brother, wondering if I needed to go to the hospital.

“Karl Marx?” he said. “Yeah, I think that was a tsunami with the face of Karl Marx.”

Shen yun, according to Shen Yun, means “the beauty of divine beings dancing.” (It can also be translated as “the rhythm of a divine spirit,” or, more simply, “God’s melody.”) The Shen Yun Performing Arts organization was founded in 2006, in New York’s Hudson Valley, and put on its first touring show in 2007. By 2009, there were three touring Shen Yun companies. Today, there are six companies, each consisting of forty or so dancers, all of them trained at the Fei Tian Academy, which is situated on a four-hundred-and-twenty-seven-acre campus established for Falun Dafa practitioners in upstate New York. The dancers are accompanied by an orchestra that incorporates Chinese instruments; each troupe includes about eighty people. In addition to the ninety-six American cities it is touring this year, Shen Yun will visit Vancouver, Berlin, Auckland, Taipei, Daegu, and dozens of other places.

Shen Yun is a nonprofit. In 2016, it reported more than seventy-five million dollars in assets and more than twenty-two million dollars in revenue. Given the amount of money the organization seems to spend on advertising, it is hard to believe that it could be in the black, but the Guardian has reported that each city’s Shen Yun advertising campaign is sponsored by the local Falun Dafa association. The ad blitzes are carefully coördinated—“Shen Yun Ads” is basically a season on the calendar now. In January, I decided to double-check my woozy memories and buy a ticket to see Shen Yun again, at Lincoln Center. After the purchase went through, I received a survey that asked me which of the thirty-six different versions of the Shen Yun ad that ran in New York—Newsday spots, Metro North posters, brochures in the mail—had convinced me to buy tickets. Shen Yun saturation has reached such a ludicrous intensity that it has, in recent months, become a meme.