NEW YORK—Having grown up attending the ballet and frequenting performances at Lincoln Center, Josh Guberman still found the performance by Shen Yun Performing Arts a new kind of experience.
“The costumes, the color, the pageantry, everything is very beautiful,” he said.
The moment when the curtain opened was “exciting, electric, very compelling,” he said, and during the course of the performance he saw a side of China that he was not accustomed to.
“[It was] something very innocent, and kind, and special, and tolerant,” he said.
Mr. Guberman is the President and CEO of Core Development Group, a major real estate development company that builds residential and commercial buildings in Manhattan and Brooklyn. He saw Shen Yun at the Lincoln Center’s David H. Koch Theater, Jan. 14.
Shen Yun is a classical Chinese dance company founded in 2006 with the mission to revive China’s traditional culture through music and dance. Their performances present ethnic and folk dances from different regions in China and stories that span China’s 5,000 years of civilization.
“The diversity of seeing Chinese culture and seeing many different ethnic dances from all over the history of China is very compelling,” Mr. Guberman said.
Attending the performance with him was Ms. Megan McCabe, a former model. She chimed in with similar impressions of the performance.
“I think the costumes are beautiful, the women are delicate, and the dancing is phenomenal,” she said.
Traditional Chinese culture has been nearly lost today’s mainland China where the atheist Chinese Communist Party has enacted systematic campaigns to destroy traditional beliefs.
“China was once known as Shen Zhou—The Divine Land … For thousands of years, Buddhist, Taoist, and other disciplines were at the heart of society. Calligraphy, music, medicine, attire, and much more were said to have been passed down from the heavens,” explains the company’s website.
This upright, majestic culture, is what Shen Yun presents on stage.
“Very, very special, very nice,” Mr. Guberman said of Shen Yun’s performance.
Reporting by Sherry Dong and Kristina Skorbach
New York-based Shen Yun Performing Arts has four touring companies that perform around the world. For more information, visit ShenYunPerformingArts.org.
Epoch Times considers Shen Yun Performing Arts the significant cultural event of our time. We have proudly covered audience reaction since Shen Yun’s inception in 2006.
