TUCSON, Ariz.—Real estate investor Cindy Rarick has won five tournament championships on the Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA) tour, and she knows true athletes when she sees them. 

“The talent of all the people that were on stage was just incredible,” Ms. Rarick said. She had just seen Shen Yun Performing Arts at the Tucson Music Hall with her two sisters and a friend on Wednesday evening, March 8, 2017.

Founded in 2006 and based in New York, Shen Yun is the world’s top classical Chinese dance and music company. This is its first year to perform in Tucson. 

The world-class performing arts company aims to revive the 5,000-year, divinely inspired traditional Chinese culture, which has been nearly lost under decades of communist rule.

Ms. Rarick was fascinated by the brilliant colors of the dancers’ costumes, the music of Shen Yun’s live orchestra, which includes Western and Chinese instruments, and the special effects that integrated the dancing with the animated, projected backdrops.

Shen Yun’s dancers specialize in classical Chinese dance, an art form perfected over thousands of years. Each story-based dance shares a piece of China’s rich history.

“Each story had a message, and I think that each message was very good,” Ms. Rarick said.

China was once known as “Shen Zhou,” or “The Divine Land,” and its people believed their culture was bestowed upon them from the heavens. Shen Yun’s artists pay tribute to this ancient tradition by finding inspiration in the divine and within their own spiritual faith to excel in their art.

This positive energy and the athleticism of the dancers made the performance “very exhilarating, and amusing, and exciting, and thrilling,” Ms. Rarick said. One part of the performance that particularly stood out to Ms. Rarick was a lovely dance called “Yellow Blossoms.”

Ms. Rarick said everyone in her group enjoyed the performance very much. “It was so beautiful. I highly recommend it to everybody,” she said.