NEW YORK—Sheila Rogoff felt connected to humanity as she watched Shen Yun Performing Art’s sold-out performance at Lincoln Center on the evening of Jan 11.
“I loved it. I loved the presentation,” said Ms. Rogoff, a music industry retiree. “I looked forward to seeing it and it was everything I anticipated, and more.”
The show was a birthday present to Ms. Rogoff from a friend.
Ms. Rogoff said she was very impressed by the music. “It’s got its own majesty.”
“The orchestra was great. I think they did a stupendous job,” she said. “I was really taken with it.”
Shen Yun Performing Arts is a New York-based classical Chinese dance group founded in 2006. Each performance is accompanied by an orchestra that melds a Western orchestral base with Eastern instruments—such as the two-stringed Chinese violin, called the erhu.
Ms. Rogoff said she was also deeply moved by Shen Yun’s vocalists, who sang Chinese lyrics in the style of bel canto.
“It was good even though I didn’t understand the language,” she said. “But having the translated lyrics on the screen was very meaningful to me, and it touched me very much.”
Ms. Rogoff felt that in a world where people can be so divided, the lyrics provided a sense of hope.
“[The lyrics] called for a coming together of people, of ideas,” Ms. Rogoff said. “That was the message I got and I enjoyed the message very much.”
“I think the feeling was that we’re all the same, we all come from the same creator and we should all strive to be as one people, and what could be more positive than that?” she said.
Ms. Rogoff attended the show with Maxine Friedman, a retired senior electrical estimator.
“The sopranos, their voices were beautiful, just beautiful,” Ms. Friedman said.
“It was very very well done,” she said.”[Singing] with the piano ... was very simple but elegant in a subtle way.”
Ms. Rogoff agreed, saying, “The singers were terrific.”
Shen Yun Performing Arts has two bilingual masters of ceremonies. “The narrators came out and in a few words expressed what we were going to be seeing, and that was helpful,” Ms. Rogoff said.
She said she very much enjoyed the classical techniques of classical Chinese dance.
Classical Chinese dance requires its dancers to master difficult technical skills—such as complicated combinations of leaps, jumps, and spins.
“But these people are very special dancers,” she said. “I don’t know how they accumulated such talent, but it’s amazing.”
Ms. Friedman also said she also particularly enjoyed the high-tech digital backdrop that accompanied each act, especially “the vibrancy of the colors.”
“It was great to see all that culture [for] all these years,” she said. “To have the opportunity here to see it was really a privilege.”
Reporting by Alec Wang and Amelia Pang
New York-based Shen Yun Performing Arts has four touring companies that perform simultaneously around the world. For more information, visit Shen Yun Performing Arts.
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.
