PERTH, Australia—For the past two years, Peter Collier has been trying to bring Shen Yun to Western Australia (WA).
“That’s a living, breathing manifestation of everything that Chinese culture is about,” Mr. Collier, who’s also the opposition leader in the legislative council and Shadow Minister for Police, said.
“I fought for this,” he added. “I fought to get it here in Western Australia.”
Shen Yun, whose mission is to bring back traditional Chinese culture before communism, has been on Beijing’s blacklist since its establishment.
With Shen Yun performing at the government-funded His Majesty’s Theatre in Perth for the first time, the state’s Shadow Minister of Cultures and Arts said he was “delighted with the outcome.”
“We must never ever, ever forget the real Chinese culture. As much as you can try to take that from the very people that lived for 5,000 years in this respect, we mustn’t,” he noted.
“We must be brave, we must be bold, we must be noble, and we must put Chinese culture out there at the forefront. Because when we try to eradicate that, we give up on life.”
For Mr. Collier, the classical Chinese dance performance has “got to be global.”
What’s happened over the last century, he added, is that the spiritual heritage of China has been almost “eradicated from people’s lives, from people’s minds” under the atheist regime, which saw this tradition as an ideological threat.
“It’s a very, very dangerous place to be,” he remarked.
Shen Yun Brings Out The Depth Of Chinese Culture, Humanity And Spirituality: Lawyer
“People don’t talk about it,” he said. “Largely, we would think of China as a culture that doesn’t have a belief in a higher being at all.”
The cultural revolution has largely purged the 5,000 years of culture out of China, so people “don’t get to understand the full context of the depth of Chinese culture, the depth of their humanity, as well as the depth of their spirituality.”
“So bringing this out tonight was wonderful to see,” he added.
Reporting by NTD and Nina Nguyen.
The Epoch Times is a proud sponsor of Shen Yun Performing Arts. We have covered audience reactions since Shen Yun’s inception in 2006.
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