TORONTO—Award-winning television director, producer, and writer Theresa Kowall-Shipp is an expert in delivering solid entertainment and she thought Shen Yun Performing Arts was as well.
Ms. Kowall-Shipp attended Shen Yun’s second performance at Sony Centre on Thursday, Jan. 22, and left effuse with praise for what she'd just seen.
“The performance is much more than I expected,” she said. “It is truly beautiful.”
Shen Yun is the world’s premiere classical Chinese dance performing arts company. It’s currently wrapping up the Canadian leg of its world tour with six shows in Toronto. Ms. Kowall-Shipp gave warm praise to the performers.
“I think, having been a dancer at one point in my life, I can appreciate the amount of effort that these performers have gone through. This company is rehearsed impeccably,” she said.
“To be so beautifully in unison, for the dancers to feel each other and to work together so seamlessly is so much more challenging then you can imagine unless you have been, literally, in those shoes.”
These days Ms. Kowall-Shipp is a Gemini-nominated and Canadian Film and Television Production Association Indie Award-winning TV producer, director, and writer.
She has worked across many genres and was the original creator of Recipe to Riches, senior producer for Christine Cushing Live, and writer, producer, or director for many other programs that have aired on CTV, CBC, Global, YTV, WTN, The Travel Network U.S., LIFE NETWORK, HGTV, Food Network Canada, BBC, Discovery, Bravo!, and Discovery Kids.
She is currently producing and directing a six-part documentary on Chinese food in North America, an experience that has exposed her to the richness of Chinese culture.
“A lot of people are not aware of the incredible depth of the Chinese culture and also how it’s intertwined with the rest of the world for generations and generations, centuries really.”
Shen Yun was founded on a mission to revive China’s divinely inspired culture, a heritage that spanned 5,000 years. After the communist regime came to power there in 1949, much of that culture was systematically destroyed.
But culture is essential to humankind, and as someone that helps express that culture Ms. Kowall-Shipp had a definite affinity for Shen Yun’s mission.
“Artists, chefs, chefs are artists, dancers are artists, choreographers, musicians, they are the keepers of the cultural flame,” she said.
She found the idea that traditional Chinese culture and beliefs were being lost in China to be a real loss.
“It’s very sad to me to think that that might be what is happening in China right now. I certainly hope, like the dance we saw tonight where the young dancer is aspiring to take his art back to China, I certainly hope we get a chance to see that in our lifetimes.”
With reporting by NTD Television
New York-based Shen Yun Performing Arts has four touring companies that perform around the world. Shen Yun’s International Company will perform in Toronto until Jan. 25. For more information, visit ShenYunPerformingArts.org.
Epoch Times considers Shen Yun Performing Arts the significant cultural event of our time. We have proudly covered audience reaction since Shen Yun’s inception in 2006.
