Fine Arts Journalist: A Beautiful Way to Present Culture and History

Freelance art writer and artist, Ms. Ringwald was in the audience of the Shen Yun show.
Fine Arts Journalist: A Beautiful Way to Present Culture and History
Ms. Ringwald, a freelance art writer and artist (The Epoch Times)
5/13/2009
Updated:
10/1/2015
<a><img src="https://www.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2015/09/LiliaRingwald.jpg" alt="Ms. Ringwald, a freelance art writer and artist (The Epoch Times)" title="Ms. Ringwald, a freelance art writer and artist (The Epoch Times)" width="320" class="size-medium wp-image-1828330"/></a>
Ms. Ringwald, a freelance art writer and artist (The Epoch Times)
COSTA MESA, Calif.— Ms. Ringwald, a freelance art writer and artist, was in the audience of the Shen Yun show on May 12 in Orange County Performing Arts Center.

New York-based Shen Yun Performing Arts Company has delighted audiences of all ages and backgrounds around the world. Shen Yun presents a celebration of China’s traditional arts featuring world-class performers, dazzling costumes and backdrops, powerful drum rhythms, and an orchestra.

The production gives audiences the opportunity to experience a lost heritage inspired by the legends and values of centuries of Chinese culture before communist rule.

The show helped to give Ms. Ringwald new knowledge about traditional Chinese culture, and she was happy to give The Epoch Times her impressions of the performance.

Ms. Ringwald had a fascination for ancient culture, saying that the ancient worlds were entirely new for her.

“They had very wonderful male dancers, wonderful women too, but the male dancers were strong and acrobatic.”

She also enjoyed the animated 3-D digital backdrop, particularly the mountains, saying, “That was beautiful.” She could see the benefit of using modern-day technology to bring the past into the present.

Ms. Ringwald also enjoyed “the very lyrical, kind of angelic … women dancing with white and flowing kind of sleeves [Flowing Sleeves]. … They kind of had an angelic, supernatural look to it.

“It’s beautiful to present your culture and history.”

She commented on the dance Dignity and Compassion, in which the setting was a prison in modern-day China, where a Falun Dafa prisoner of conscience is cruelly tortured to the brink of death. When her captor falls into a deep slumber afterward, he is visited by an otherworldly vision in which guardian deities seek to claim his life as repayment for his terrible act. The persecuted believer appears then as a Bodhisattva and is moved by compassion to have the man’s life spared. The act of mercy is not without a message: Terrible consequences follow from persecuting these innocent people. Upon awakening, the policeman is filled with deep regret for what he has done, and promptly sets free the Falun Dafa woman while asking her forgiveness.

Ms. Ringwald said, “That scene was interesting, it was dramatic, it had drama … it’s beautiful.”

Ms. Ringwald was familiar with the old Chinese myths and legends, as she had majored in comparative literature. “The stories in China are very magical, very mystical, they’re like fairy tales, very supernatural. I’m familiar with them,” she said.

She felt that telling these stories through dance was “very lovely,” and in a lot of instances similar in all cultures. “On one level all of these cultures are very connected.”

She could relate to fairy tales in her own German culture, saying, “Well the fairy is the tree. Nature is in the flower. The flower was in that performance, the lotus, the flower, and all of a sudden the flowers turn into girls, like different petals of the flower, the different dancers, become the flower. And you know, the colors, a lot of it was connected to nature.”

The Epoch Times is a proud sponsor of the Shen Yun Performing Arts Spring Tour 2009. For more information please visit ShenYunPerformingArts.org

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