“I actually cried all the way through from the emotion and the connection from the performers on stage to the people in the audience,” she said. “The beauty of the performance was very … it was overwhelming.”
Trauma Transformed to Beauty
Ms. Collier also expressed surprise that some of the stories performed by Shen Yun were in relation to Falun Gong and learned that many Shen Yun artists also follow the Falun Gong spiritual practice, which, as the story explains, teaches adherents to live by the universal principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance.The entertainer said she was familiar with Falun Gong from seeing them petition for quite a few years in front of the Chinese embassy in Canberra due to China’s ruling Chinese Communist Party persecuting practitioners and subjecting prisoners of conscience to the horrible crime of organ harvesting.
“I am aware of what’s happening with the organ harvesting in China and the evil that is happening. So to have a performance by this dance troupe and to be able to provide people with the message of what is going on—but in such a creative, artistic way—is so powerful,” she said.
“With the arts, people come to be entertained. It is important, obviously, because we need a bit of escapism to be able to get out of our humdrum life. But to be able to do this is so intelligently creative because it’s entertaining, but it has such a powerful message. And that’s really important.”
She offered Shen Yun’s performers “big love and hugs,” especially after finding out that many of them on stage have actually “come from a background with trauma,” she said.
A ‘Lovely Combination of Joy and Pain’
Ms. Collier had high praise for Shen Yun’s artistic director.“The artistic director really nailed it. It was just such fabulous storytelling. And it was a really lovely combination of joy and pain,” she said of the range of emotions felt by the audience through Shen Yun’s numerous vignettes.
“Just a massive congratulations to all of you. This is just so important, and I’m just so honoured to have been here tonight.
“The whole thing was five-star, ten-star, a million-star. You need to get out and see it,” she said.
