SAN ANTONIO—With temperatures hovering at around 37 degrees—very cold for the South Texas city—brave theatergoers made their way to the Shen Yun matinee at the Tobin Center for the Performing Arts on Jan. 25. When they left, they took the magic of you-have-to-see-it-for-yourself performance with them.

“It’s a beautiful show. … I love the colors, it’s like fireworks. So beautiful, Mrs. Deweese, a retired nurse said.

Her husband, a retired major with the Army medical department, was fascinated by the digital 3D background that seemingly brings onstage characters onto an animated screen and then back again. “It’s like magic,” he said.

The Deweeses have traveled to China and made clear the difference between that country and the United States. Superficially, “the way the buildings are, and the roads are, and all that, the country seems similar” to U.S. cities, Mr. DeWeese said.

But in actuality, the CCP is in full control, not the people. This was especially clear because of the time period that the couple visited.

Mr. DeWeese said, “It was election day. We were there during the last election, and so everything was shut down.”

They’d been watching the news on the English-speaking channel, he explained, “and they said, ‘The president was reelected in China, and what that means … ’ and then the screen went blank for three minutes.”

He theorized that the studio had to edit the script before it could be presented to English-speaking listeners.

Mrs. Deweese added, “Very censored. We enjoyed visiting, but we didn’t see anything like this there.”

Daniela Contreras, also attending the matinee performance, was particularly moved by this year’s piece depicting faithful people being persecuted. “You believe in something, and yet you’re getting punished for believing in something. … That was moving to see.”

Ms. Contreras, a manager for a Honda dealership, was accompanied by her niece, her brother, and some friends. “Everyone is here,” she said.

“We’d were just talking about [the costumes]. The colors, the way [they] capture the light, absolutely beautiful … and the movement of the dresses, it’s absolutely beautiful.”

Ms. Contreras felt the same way about the digital backdrops. “The color that comes through, the clarity … They have it when someone was coming out of the screens and into the stage—just breathtaking.”

She thought the dancers were amazing. “The way they get in the air, the way they just moved through a dance like it was nothing.”

Classical Chinese dance is a complete system that embodies hundreds of years of aesthetic principles involving movements that also carry inner meaning—making varied story-telling possible and profound.

Despite her own breathless descriptions, Ms. Contreras felt she couldn’t quite make her feelings understood. “Just, people need to experience it. I can’t explain it like this unless you see it, then you’ll understand it,” she said.

“You can’t explain it; you have to see it.”