PRAGUE—New York-based
Shen Yun Performing Arts took to the stage in the capital of the Czech Republic from March 10 to March 12 with four sold-out performances at the Congress Center.
Jaromír Sladkovsky, board chairman and CEO of the Raiffeisen Investment Company, attended the opening night performance on March 10 and felt deeply impressed by the historical truth presented.
“From my point of view, culture is what makes a nation a nation and what survives. So those civilizations that had no culture, there’s nothing left of them. And
China, as a very old nation, has a very broad culture and it’s worth looking into that a little bit,” said Mr. Sladkovsky.
Shen Yun is the world’s premier
classical Chinese dance company, with a mission to revive the 5,000-year civilization that China once nearly lost to the modern communist takeover.
“For us Europeans, it’s great to see a culture from another part of the world and feel the emotion of that
culture,” said Mr. Sladkovsky. The two-and-a-half-hour performance of
dance and music vignettes inspired profound reflection in Mr. Sladkovsky.
“In the course of the show, I was thinking about setting the ensemble in contemporary realities, and the older you get, the more you think that human life is shorter and shorter in the course of history, and it makes us work on that even within that culture, that place of ours, so that what is natural to us as living in a democratic society, to protect that, to keep working on that,” he said.
“The need to work on the values of our society,” was Mr. Sladkovsky’s inspiration from the evening’s performance, “often we take it for granted, and it’s not so given,” he said.
“For me—these performances are always an incentive to learn more, to study something, to look at some historical realities. That’s what I take away.”
Reporting by Milan Kajínek.
