“It’s very interesting,” he said at The State Theatre at Playhouse Square in Cleveland on the afternoon of Feb. 4. Mr. Budnik attended the performance with his young daughter, as a celebration for her birthday.

“It brings it alive with the music and the dance,” Mr. Budnik said. “There’s a sort of lost grandeur ... It was very impactful how beautiful it all was.”

Mr. Budnik said he’s Christian himself, and could relate to many spiritual themes in the traditional Chinese culture he saw on stage, including “the idea that we’re incarnated beings.”

“I think we’ve lost a lot of tradition,” he said. “I think a lot of people are lost today without having those roots, you know? ... I feel like we need that. We need to get back to something that’s a little more solid.”

Mr. Puls attended the performance with his son, who loves history and “was extraordinarily excited” when he realized they would be seeing Shen Yun.

“What we hear coming from China’s is usually negative,” Mr. Puls explained. “It’s just really wonderful to see that there’s different sides of the culture in China and the history may still get to prevail a little bit with everything that’s going on.”

“It’s really cool to see the very young people that are participating in this and obviously have worked very, very hard and are very passionate about the message that they’re sharing,” he said.

Mr. Puls said that prior to the performance, he hadn’t known much about China beyond the fact that it was one of the oldest societies, and that modern China was often headlined by bad news.

“So it’s really interesting to see a lot about their history,” he said.

“It really seems to lead to be a lot about love and about understanding, and about acceptance of different ways of life and different views,” he said. “It really just paints a different side of, of what possibly is going on, and that there are some people that are trying to share a different perspective, and to see and love people outside of their traditional comfort zone.”