WASHINGTON—Basically everyone who sees Shen Yun Performing Arts likes it. Most people love it. Then there are some people, like Dr. Karyn Trader-Leigh, who are simply blown away and can speak at length on what, precisely, captivated them about the performance.
Shen Yun Performing Arts, based in New York, tours the world on a mission to revive 5,000 years of divinely inspired Chinese culture.
Dr. Trader-Leigh, the President and CEO of KTA Global Partners, a management consulting firm in the District of Columbia, saw Shen Yun at the Kennedy Center on March 28.
As her husband—smartly dressed with a jacket and pocket square—stood nearby, drawing on his pipe, Ms. Trader-Leigh proceeded to describe in detail her enjoyment of the show.
“If you are a Chinese parent and your family has been here for generations, or not long, this is a wonderful opportunity to give your children your historic culture. So I really like that opportunity to do that.
“Then there’s also the opportunity to expose other people to the history of the Chinese culture. I like the pieces around nature. I like the pieces around the spiritual culture, the values and the value system, and the role that that has played throughout the culture. And then of course it’s interesting, you get a sort of juxtaposition of current, modern China when you see the battle around how they regard the Falun Dafa, and some of the ... I’ve been to China a couple of times, and there’s this interesting choice and freedom, and the role of spiritual development and control, and the struggles of a society. You get a snapshot on some of those issues in that last piece.
“Then there’s the artistic beauty there. It’s intriguing and fascinating, the artistic value of the backdrop and how they interweave the dance and the theater, so someone literally pops out of the screen, the way they have created that and created context, what’s going on in the heavens and in the spirit world, and how it plays into the earth and into consciousness. It’s ... you almost have to parse through and think about what you’re seeing, because there’s a lot of communication on a lot of different levels, about life, about spiritual evolution and development there.
“I like the piece on Tibet. I loved the playfulness of the monks, and what life is like in a cloistered life. It made me think of life before television in terms of how we entertained ourselves, the rich pageantry, all of those kinds of things.
“The other thing that struck me with respect to history was that history is often told from the eyes of the wealthy and palaces and kingships, so I was glad to see a piece on an ethnic subgroup, that was important. Then there was the Tibetan piece, especially when you know what goes on between China and Tibet. It was nice to see in the context of this whole event those different pieces and stories.”
The executive mused about the values portrayed in the performance.
