SAN JOSE, Calif.—When former Broadway actress Tami Damiano tried to describe the experience of seeing Shen Yun Performing Arts, at first she seemed lost for words.

“It’s beyond anything I could have imagined,” she said. “The artistry, the athleticism, the beauty, the way they use their costumes, and the sleeve dance, and the colors.”

Based in New York, Shen Yun is the world’s premier classical Chinese dance company. In each Shen Yun production, dancers are accompanied by a live orchestra with both Eastern and Western musical instruments.

The dancers wear brilliantly colored costumes inspired by traditional Chinese clothing. In “Water Sleeves,” the sleeve dance Damiano mentioned, female dancers wear long sleeves that flow behind their arms.

“The fact that it was bringing in sort of the physical, what the dancers were doing, but also visually what the projections were bringing out, it sort of transformed it into this whole other plane,” Damiano said.

“More, more, more,” she said. “It was astounding.”

Traditional Chinese culture placed great importance on moral values such as faith in the divine and harmony with nature. In recent times, however, the Chinese communist regime has tried to wipe out these ancient traditions and replace them with the communist ideology of atheism.

Shen Yun aims to bring this lost spirituality back to life in its performances.

“I thought that was a really beautiful mission, that there was such a mind-body-spiritual mission part of it,” Damiano said. “That they were wanting to bring that back, I think that’s very important. ... It’s really important to have the soul and the mind and the body connection, and it’s very evident in the performance. It’s really beautiful.”

“It seemed like this soul was helping bring all of nature and all of people together and to unify them,” Damiano said of this dance piece. “It seemed like it was coming from the heart and the soul.”

“It’s a crazy world we live in, and I think we all need to remember that at heart we’re all the same,” she said. “But to keep your culture is so important because you don’t want to lose that part of what makes each culture unique. The love of that can just radiate outwards.”