TORONTO—Urszula Starzec closed her eyes and let the music take her on a journey as she sat in the audience of Shen Yun Performing Arts Friday night.
Along the way she passed through beautiful scenery that took her from her seat in the audience at the Sony Centre for the Performing Arts into a world of wonder. She remembers the mountains, the river, the fields, the sunshine, and the moon and feeling enveloped by their beauty.
She had just seen these images on backdrops earlier on in the performance and they accompanied her afterward as she listened to the music of erhu virtuoso Mei Xuan.
“Gorgeous, absolutely beautiful, heart-warming music,” she said.
Ms. Starzec is a music teacher who has studied music and played the piano for many years. Watching the performance, she felt an appreciation for Shen Yun’s orchestra, as well as the vocal soloists.
Through their ability to perform in the bel canto technique, while maintaining proper Chinese pronunciation and diction, the soloists have achieved a remarkable feat in the musical world.
The songs’ lyrics were projected into the background, however, and Ms. Starzec felt that they brought her journey to a spiritual plane.
“It puts the beauty of spirituality and the music together,” she said of the performance.
For Ms. Starzec, however, the beauty of Shen Yun’s performance went beyond music to a history of thousands of years of Chinese culture. That culture is displayed in the work of Shen Yun’s dancers, world-leading artists performing a dance form passed down from antiquity, enriched in China’s imperial courts dynasty after dynasty.
“The beauty of the dances [is] spectacular,” she said.
“I’m not a dancer, I’m a musician, I listen to music very, very carefully, but the dances are just amazing and the costumes, the scenography, and choreography of the dances—absolutely amazing. I’ve never seen anything like that,” Ms. Starzec said.
“It made me want to be a dancer, had I been a little bit younger. It’s absolutely beautiful,” she said.
Reporting by NTD Television and Madalina Hubert
New York-based Shen Yun Performing Arts has four touring companies that perform simultaneously around the world. Shen Yun’s World Company will perform in Toronto until Jan. 26. For more information, visit: ShenYunPerformingArts.org
The Epoch Times considers Shen Yun Performing Arts the significant cultural event of our time. We have proudly covered audience reactions since Shen Yun’s inception in 2006.
