LONDON—Dazzling colours, outstanding dance techniques and a live orchestra that blends east and west—audiences around the world have described Shen Yun as a spectacle.
Leo Hohenberg who watched Shen Yun at London’s Eventim Apollo on April 23, was one of them.
“I loved it, from the beginning to the end, it was a really beautiful, colourful, fantastic performance,” he said.
He called Shen Yun “uplifting.”
His wife was deeply impressed, too, describing the performance as a way of “expressing that there are many ways to find a higher self” through art.
“I think that the idea is to meet the audience on many many levels, not only with our eyes … all the senses,” she said.
Established in 2006, Shen Yun has a mission to revive the authentic Chinese culture that was almost wiped out under communist rule in China. Through the expressive medium of classical Chinese dance, the performances bring tales from ancient times to the modern day to life on stage.
‘Like a Flower Opening Completely’
Hohenburg described the colours as “very bright, very beautiful.”“You have to feel good afterwards,” his wife added. “The colours have like a certain vibration, like a certain energy,” she said.
“It was a beautiful mixture, I think, of the music, the movement, and the colours, so all of the senses are involved and there’s a slow progression ... it brings you to the end where you’re like a flower opening completely,” she said.
She especially found hope in the last scene of the performance, which according to the Shen Yun program book is called “The Final Moment.”
It tells the story of Falun Dafa, a spiritual discipline that has been persecuted in China since the late 1990s. Virtue and vice collide in the piece, with the Falun Dafa practitioners depicted maintaining their faith and inner strength, holding fast to the principles of “truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance.”
She said: “The very nice idea was to try in a very poetic way to say that young people can make a change and can erase maybe the mistakes of the past. We need to try to understand that and try to encourage our youth to do that. To me [it] really had that message like start again, erase everything and start again.”
“It’s a very nice message,” Hohenberg added.
