GOLD COAST, Australia—Professional dancer and 2017 Gold Coast Eisteddfod grand champion soloist Isabelle Hancock was amazed by Shen Yun Performing Arts at the full-house opening night of its 2024 Australian tour at HOTA on Friday.
“I really enjoyed it,” Ms. Hancock said. “The costumes are beautiful on stage … Everyone’s so together, it’s so [in] unison.
“It is just amazing to watch,” she said.
“It looks absolutely phenomenal onstage, all together,” she said. “The jumps are beautiful, and the turns as well. With all the different variety of them, and the flips, it’s really great to watch.”
“We haven’t seen anything like this before,” Mrs. Hancock said. “Costumes are fabulous. So far, I think my favourite performance was the one with the long sleeves,” she said of Shen Yun’s “Sleeves of Grace” piece.
Mrs. Hancock added, “We didn’t realise that the show progresses back 5,000 years. So that’s pretty interesting itself, and obviously there’s a lot of different themes going on. You actually learn a lot, too, whilst watching the show, as well as the beautiful dancers.”
Shen Yun’s mission is to remind the world of the true essence of authentic Chinese culture, which has ancient roots dating back to “China before communism.”
‘Years and Years and Years’
Also in the audience on Friday evening was Leigh Elliot, who has been a dance teacher for 42 years.
“I like the fact we’ve got this little synopsis before each number, so it makes it interesting that we can follow along,” she said.
She expressed admiration for “the classical technique because that’s the foundation of all dance.”
An Amazing Culture
Donna Ireland, a team leader at Dementia Australia, also said she enjoyed Shen Yun’s performance.“It’s just given me so much information about the culture, and it’s just beautiful,” she said.
“I think it’s really important that people understand the importance of bringing that culture back to China because sometimes, we only hear about the negative and all the trouble rather than the amazing culture and the fantastic spiritual side of China.
“And when I was watching about the trouble there, it broke my heart to see that was still happening today,” she said.
‘There’s Divinity Within Us’
Ms. Ireland said that the spirituality presented by Shen Yun resonated with her own beliefs.“Seeing that it’s the divine coming to earth, that really resonates because we’re all divine beings here ... that’s my belief,” she said. “I didn’t realize that was also a belief that was in China as well—I think [there’s] divinity within us all.”
The CCP regards the spiritual foundation that made up China’s traditional society as a threat to its aesthetic ideology. It persecutes faith groups and tightly controls the ones that exist there today.
“The more people that understand that that’s not the culture—the real culture is the dancing, the singing, the spiritual, and understand that—the more people can understand more about China,” Ms. Ireland said.
“My husband’s a Buddhist, so when I heard, oh my goodness, there’s violence because people are actually meditating, I was [in disbelief],” she added.
“That broke my heart because people should be free to practice what they want, whatever religion they want, and not be penalised for it. So and I think in today’s modern society, it’s crazy that that’s still happening.”
She said she was leaving Shen Yun feeling “amazed, touched, and inspired.”
“I think you can see there’s a lot of love.”
