WELLINGTON, New Zealand—“Please bring it back every year,” said Bruce McIntyre, the founder of MacPac Wilderness Equipment, after he attended the fourth of five sold-out Shen Yun Performing Arts shows in the city this year.
For 35 years, Mr. McIntyre
ran MacPac, a brand that specialises in outdoor recreational equipment. He later became involved in other businesses before co-founding an independent school,
Seven Oaks School, based in New Zealand’s Christchurch.
“I just think it’s brilliant,” Mr. McIntyre said of
Shen Yun on April 15. “I was amazed. It was just absolutely fantastic ... I was just super impressed.”
Founded in 2006, New York-based Shen Yun seeks to reclaim and renew the divinely-inspired
Chinese culture through the universal language of music and dance.
Shen Yun presents spectacular
large-scale dances set in various dynasties and heavenly realms, as well as mini-dramas derived from ancient legends and stories in the present day that exemplify timeless virtues.
“I think it’s just perfect,” Mr. McIntyre said of performers’ efforts to revive China’s divinely-inspired culture.
“We just need some reality in our world and some connection with our soul with our spirit with the source, the Creator. We just need that, and this is just a totally connecting us to that and brings us back to what what we have with inside us,” he said of Shen Yun. “So it’s amazing.”
Mr. McIntyre said that he loves that Shen Yun presents a
cultural experience. “It has so much meaning, and joy, and I just feel alive. I feel really grateful that I’ve seen it and experienced it.”
He enjoyed all of Shen Yun’s programs, describing them as “so so good.”
“I love the energy of them,” he said, in describing the dances set in the wilderness of
Tibet and Mongolia. “The aliveness and the whole energy of that sort of beautiful male energy where it can be expressed so beautifully.”
He said he also enjoyed the female group-based dances, describing them as “very delicate.”
“They’re totally amazing,” he said in describing all of the Shen Yun dancers. “I just love the way that when they flip over, they sort of stop in mid-air for a fraction of a second. That’s the way it seems and I just think they’re incredible.”
“Not just that, but everything is incredible,” Mr. McIntyre continued, describing his impression of how all the elements came together. “The subtleness and just the whole performance ... the fact the whole thing was
live music, was live the dancing, and everything was working so perfectly together. That sense of oneness. It was pretty amazing.”
He said he “particularly love[d]”
the erhu, a two-stringed instrument that has been around for thousand of years, that closely resembles the human voice and can express a wide range of emotions. Mr. McIntyre said the sound of the erhu made him feel “really happy.”
“It was beautiful. Maybe it’s a past life thing, but I really feel connected to that ... I don’t know, this is the resonance inside which I don’t know how to describe it. It’s just beautiful. It’s just old and just lives inside me somehow.”
He praised the performances by Shen Yun’s
vocalists, especially the soprano performance on the night.
Shen Yun’s award-winning singers are uniquely trained in the almost-lost bel canto singing technique—a method once prominent in both China and Europe that is thought to produce the purest and most beautiful sound.
“The singing is pretty. I think: ‘How can they come up with that amount of sound, how can that amount?’ There weren’t microphones. I [didn’t] see microphones, and that sound [was] coming out from a woman. That’s pretty impressive.”
Reporting by NTD and Mimi Nguyen Ly.
