“It was fantastic. Everything was fantastic. The combination of everything together was very special, because if you play one instrument or if you’re a dancer or painter, it’s only one art form you have to worry about, but when you see everything together, you get overwhelmed about what they had to go through as performers, for me. That’s what I felt.”
“I thought [the pianist] was fantastic. She did a wonderful job balancing both of the singers, because it’s not a easy thing to do. I could hear both the singers very well, and it was very well-proportioned.”
“We had English translation [for the soloist singers], [but] even if I could not read the English [lyrics], I could feel the singers were very clear in their diction, in their enunciation of the words, so I could almost guess what the text was because it was so clear ... If I had to guess what it was about, I could get pretty close. They did a wonderful of communicating the meaning of the text or the spiritual idea behind the piece, to me ... enlightenment, happiness, calmness, acceptance, joy.”
“The pianist wasn’t just focused on herself, and the singer wasn’t just focused on herself. They were listening to each other, which is very harmonious, which is important. People don’t always do that, so it was done very well.”
“I loved the sound [of the erhu soloist]... It’s a haunting sound. It’s a beautiful sound, and I think for a lot of westerners it has these images of sounds from a long time ago, ancient, ancient sounds, kind of cinematic sounds from hundreds of years ago, thousands of years ago, so its very atmospheric and very haunting ... Kind of a melancholic happiness.”
“Everything was really, really well done ... when you have a whole orchestra ... 40 people, and then 40 dancers on stage, think about how hard it is, how much work goes into everything happening on time, in time and on time. It’s really admirable, and I thought that it was flawlessly done.”
“To think that this was happening so many thousands of years ago, they already had what people see in gymnastics today in the Olympics, was already happening 5000 years ago, that’s just fascinating to think about.”
“Music makes you feel something, and you cant always say it, because then you wouldn’t need music ... what I thought was interesting was just the way [Shen Yun’s music] made you feel. I’ve listened primarily to western music, classical music, and the tonalities are different, the scales are different. The tonal system is different, so when you think about this kind of music, it makes you feel new colors that as a westerner you wouldn’t necessarily hear, different kind of scales, different instruments, different tonal systems, which is really refreshing.”
“Today everyone is on their smart phones all the time, and attention span is so low, so when you’re presented with any kind of art form, it kind of rips your unconsciousness and puts it to another level, another spiritual dimension, so I felt that, [like] any very, very good performance, but I definitely felt it a lot tonight.”
“Today its just so hard to find anything that has any real meaning. You watch the news and social media all day, and there’s so much advertising in everything, so it’s really rare that [a production] works so hard to provide people with any spiritual value ... People aren’t really used to that. I think it catches them off guard, but in a good way, that there’s people working so hard to bring this message to people ... you’re not used to this really, really large scale effort of dancers and musicians and painters and choreographers to work that hard, so that’s really, really interesting. I think people will benefit from that in the future.”
“Congratulations, first of all [to Shen Yun’s artists]. Just continue doing it, and I would hope to see more of what you’re doing, because whoever is composing, whoever’s directing has a lot of visions ... so I think there’s a lot of potential. I actually didn’t know it was only [founded in] 2006. I thought it was from 50 years ago ... so if it’s only been a few years, there is a lot more than you can do, so I think everyone’s looking forward to that.”
