“It’s absolutely ... a beautiful, it is a lovely expression of the culture and the history that should never be lost,” said Gail Levin, a retired vice president at a financial institution.
But it is precisely the beauty, wisdom, and divinely bestowed culture of China’s past that today’s communist party has spent decades dismantling.
“It’s wrong to lose history, because then you tend to repeat things that … you don’t need to repeat, but you also lose the touch that people have with their ancestry,” Ms. Levin said.
“Ancestry is so very important. It’s surprising that they don’t want to reflect that in the current state of affairs.”
Traditional Chinese culture has roots in Buddhist and Taoist thought, emphasizing reverence for heaven and moral values such as respect, kindness, and tolerance.
Ms. Levin attended the Feb. 22 matinee with her husband, Branko Galunic, a retired chief structural engineer.
“There should be some welcoming of the new and the old, seems to me,” he said.
“[The music] is very different from our Western music, either in classical or popular music, and therefore, it’s a pleasure to hear a different kind of music.”
In addition to the live orchestra accompanying classical Chinese dances, each program includes at least one piece by a vocalist or instrumentalist.
Although the couple had seen Shen Yun in 2020, Ms. Levin didn’t remember the interactive digital screen that allows the dancers’ characters to seemingly fly from earth to the heavens.
“That was absolutely fascinating,” she said. “The way the [dancers] can come up and then are projected onto the screen, the timing was beautifully done.”
Mr. Galunic agreed. “I was not expecting it, and it was beautifully done.”
Also attending the afternoon performance at the Belk Theater at the Blumenthal Performing Arts Center were the Runyans.
Gregg Runyan is a vice president at AB Carter Inc., a company that supplies textile industries around the world. He said Shen Yun was “absolutely gorgeous, the culture, the dancing—everything is just amazing.”
Shen Yun does “a fantastic job with not only the dancing ... as well as the integration with the screen.”
And he commented on the music as well. As an amateur percussionist, he found the symphonic orchestral music instruments soothing and gorgeous. Shen Yun’s orchestra is known for its integration of both Western and Eastern instruments.
“It’s so sad to hear that they can’t do this show in China because it’s so gorgeous. I mean it, I don’t understand why not.”
As an atheist regime, the CCP has tried crush the spiritual beliefs that existed in China for 5,000 years and replace those beliefs with itself as the supreme power.
“Just in my heart. I feel—I don’t know the right word—I feel special, you know. The spiritual comes from the floor and from the screen and from the music.”
