On Today’s Episode –
Mark starts us off talking about where we are after Trump’s first 100 days in office. What the polling data is showing us.
We quickly jump into our guest Leeshai Lemish, who is with the production Shen Yun. Leeshai tells us a bit about his background, and then dives into the persecution of the show, and the crazy things they have had to deal with while combating the Chinese Government trying to get it canceled.
Tune in for all the fun
Born to an Israeli mother and a California native father, Lemish’s parents met in the Jewish state during the 1970s. They married and moved to Ohio to pursue their doctorates. When Lemish turned 5, his family moved to Israel, with occasional returns to the United States for sabbaticals in Philadelphia and San Francisco.
After serving in the Israel Defense Forces for three years, Lemish returned to California to “play baseball and go to college.” But an Asian studies class at Pomona College in the Los Angeles suburb of Claremont completely changed his life.
Lemish eventually became fluent in Chinese, although not as quickly as he would’ve liked. “They say Hebrew’s the hardest language,” he says. “Chinese was harder for me. Maybe if I’d learned it from birth, it might have been easier. It’s so different. Every word is a little drawing. I’m terrible at drawing, but I really enjoyed the concept behind it, the richness of the language.”
In college, Lemish had a friend who managed a group of Chinese artists performing at the annual Claremont Dragon Boat Festival. “They asked me to host it,” Lemish says. “At that time, it was mostly a Chinese audience for a Chinese holiday. We would get up there, and I’d crack some jokes in Chinese and improvise a little bit.”
To his surprise, Lemish says, “It was a lot of fun. People really enjoyed it.”
The following year, he says the production grew but “by then I was in London,” pursuing a master’s degree in international relations at the London School of Economics.
“It happened to be winter break and they were going to perform at Radio City [Music Hall] in New York City. They said, ‘Hey, we saw a video of you doing this in L.A. Can you come and host the performance in New York?’”
The Radio City experience, he says, was daunting, to say the least. “When you go onstage, it’s quite the thing,” Lemish says. “There’s a five-ton curtain that comes down and sweeps behind you.” Despite his initial jitters, Lemish says he found the experience “really exciting. We did three shows that weekend. I started liking it.”
From that performance in 2006, the touring production company began coalescing into a more official capacity. “It wasn’t called Shen Yun yet — it was called Divine Performing Arts,” says Lemish. The show mainly employed Chinese artists living in the West.
“It mostly started like a Chinese New Year show, an alternative to what the Chinese embassies and consulates were putting on. The official embassy performances were very, ‘Isn’t the communist party great?’ So the idea was, ‘Let’s put on our own show and celebrate traditional Chinese culture as it once was.’”
That summer, when the company had auditions for the emcee position, Lemish tried out and won the role he’d initiated.
“In the early days, we would go to different cities and there would be local artists jumping in. There would be ballet and other stuff,” he remembers. Shen Yun evolved when the group decided that “classical Chinese dance would be the main art form. The idea was that this is something that’s distinctly Chinese.”
As the show became more Chinese, the audience grew broader than its initial audience of Chinese festival-goers. “Our audience is pretty much a representation of the local demographic,” says Lemish. “There are still Chinese people who come, but I’d say now it’s maybe about 10 percent.”
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