United Kingdom: Practitioners Invited to Demonstrate Falun Gong Exercises at Birmingham Art Festival

On the 11th and 12th of September, England’s biggest free arts festival was held in the city of Birmingham. Over three hundred arts groups from England came to the performance. Falun Gong practitioners have been invited three years running to take part in the festival and this year they were the first to perform.

Practitioners from Birmingham and other cities were involved in this activity and on the 11th, on the open-air stage, practitioners gave a traditional Chinese waist-drum performance and fan dance, and demonstrated the five sets of Falun Gong exercises. The performances received applause from the public and in just under thirty minutes the presenter introduced Falun Gong and how it has spread around the world. The arena was filled with the Falun Gong music of Pu Du and Ji Shi. On the 12th, the performance was in the Birmingham Hippodrome Theatre and practitioners added another dance to the performance.

During the two-day activity, the organisers of the event also provided stalls for the arts groups. There were always lots of people around the Falun Gong stall. Some practitioners gave out leaflets and collected signatures for a petition calling for Chinese dictator and instigator of the persecution against Falun Gong, Jiang Zemin, to be brougt to justice for his crimes. Some practitioners demonstrated the exercises in front of the stalls. Lots of people signed the petition and over six thousand leaflets were distributed before the activity was finished. Lots of Chinese tourists and students received Video-CDs and over fifty people asked for information about the local practice site where they can learn the exercises for free.