PITTSBURGH—Shen Yun Performing Arts graced the stage at Benedum Center for the Performing Arts on Thursday evening, Feb. 16, leaving the audience pleased and filled with high praise for the New York-based classical Chinese dance and music company.
“The performance is spectacular,” said Henry Spinelli, a classical pianist since the age of four who has toured throughout the United States. “I appreciate the spectacle: the color, the positions on the stage, the grouping, and the grace of it all.”
Shen Yun criss-crosses the globe with one mission: to revive 5,000 years of divinely inspired Chinese culture, according to its website.
“Unfortunately, over the past 60 years, this cultural treasure has been persecuted and co-opted by the Chinese Communist Party,” it adds. “However, the deeper spiritual core of the ancient culture, with its values of benevolence, honor, propriety, wisdom, and sincerity, as well as a reverence for the gods and the heavens, cannot be destroyed.”
Mr. Spinelli, as a prominent musician who also teaches piano and music literature, as well as serving as director of the Laboratory School of Music, noticed Shen Yun’s orchestra, which combines Western classical instruments with ancient Chinese instruments, such as the 4,000-year-old erhu, or two-stringed Chinese violin.
“It is very effective,” said Mr. Spinelli. The combination of the music and dance is “superb,” he added. “Absolutely superb.”
Classical Chinese dance has a long history of thousands of years and, its “beautiful dance movements bring out the inner meaning of intrinsic thoughts and feelings, reflecting the peculiarities of human nature, the standard for human conduct, moral concepts, mental state, one’s value system, and so on,” according to Shen Yun’s website. “Classical Chinese dance is rich with expressive power and one of the most comprehensive dance systems in the world.”
“This is a great contribution to Pittsburgh,” said Mr. Spinelli.
