“It was glorious. I loved it every moment. It was visually beautiful and technically unbelievable.”
 

“How [Shen Yun] makes a different program of that complexity every year—it’s just beyond me. It’s magnificent! It’s magnificent! I really enjoyed it.”
 

“It’s just beautiful to see that some of the classical culture, the oldest in the world, is being retrieved because the politicization of the culture that has taken place in China has killed [the traditional culture]. … Chinese young people have no idea there is this tradition. They have no idea, and they are missing out on thousands of years of history.”
 

“We were in China for two years working in the mid-80s [Ms. Mount taught English there]. I absolutely loved it, but I didn’t see any Chinese culture when I was over there. That’s really sad when you take away the spirit of people. This is what’s happening with a lot of Chinese people now.

“There is nothing more capitalist and materialistic than people who have lived in a communist regime, and they are missing out on their own soul—such a pity.”
 

“The Chinese dancing tradition predates the Western classical tradition by probably a few thousand years. It’s amazing, but obviously there are teachers who have come and are teaching and retrieving that classical tradition.”
 

“The ethnic diversity of China—Tibetan folk dances and the Mongolian folk dances, the Chinese—communism evens it all out. It takes away that diversity, and that diversity is the soul of human experience in every country. How sad that it’s being lost. It’s tragic.”
 

“Like my country, Lithuania, since it’s separated from the Soviet Union [and communism], it is retrieving some of its culture. I hope that’s going to be true of China.”