SAN JOSE, Calif.—Retired company vice president Susan Chandler and her daughter, Jeanette Bent, a reporter, attended Shen Yun Performing Arts’ evening show at the Center for the Performing Arts on Dec. 26.
This was Ms. Bent’s second time seeing the performance. Having enjoyed it so much three years ago, she invited her mother to experience Shen Yun’s 2026 season. Everything was just as beautiful as she remembered.
“It’s a beautiful, beautiful show. In addition to being a reporter, I’m a choreographer. So, I look at performance art as a study, a practice. I also look at it as storytelling,” she said.
“I think the storytelling that Shen Yun does with the presentation of their physical abilities and bodies and spectacular athleticism and artistry is just exquisite. You really can’t match this type of performance art. ... Their level of mastery over their own bodies is so impressive and really inspiring.”
Based in New York, Shen Yun artists are highly trained in classical Chinese dance. Dating back thousands of years, it is one of the most athletic and expressive art forms in the world. In fact, tumbling techniques commonly seen in gymnastics and acrobatics originate from classical Chinese dance.
“I love their seamless integration of [flips and tumbling technique] into the element of dance. It’s so eloquent the way that they presented it. It’s not just gymnastics and structure and rigidity and technique—they seamlessly flow,” Ms. Bent said.
“I was watching the women during the [Tibetan dance], when they were doing their tumbling, how their legs would kick over and then their torso lifted after that,” she said. “It almost stopped time, and I could see the pause, and I saw the balance in the moment in the air. It was beautiful.”
According to the company’s website, the classical Chinese dance we see in China today is heavily mixed with military and modern dance styles. Only at Shen Yun can you find it performed in its purest form—the way it was originally passed down through the generations.
Ms. Chandler also greatly enjoyed the evening and thought the performance was “very moving and quite beautiful and eloquent.”
“I was in awe,” she said. “It’s a very moving [performance.] It’s very beautiful, the costumes are beautiful, and it really does speak to your soul.”
After learning about the artists’ mission to bring back traditional Chinese culture and raise awareness of ongoing human rights issue in present-day China under communist rule, Ms. Chandler said she felt “a really strong feeling of how peaceful and mindful [the performers] are and how the uprising in China has just been very hard, yet they stayed true to their core self and their eloquence and their love for life.”
For her, Shen Yun’s message is about kindness.
“Love is what this world needs and [the performance] just radiates love and how we should be kind to one another and care for one another,” she said. “It was beautiful, it was well put together. We enjoyed the costumes and the kindness that comes from it.”
Ms. Bent, who had only just begun her spiritual journey when she first attended Shen Yun three years ago, said she then had only a vague understanding of the performers’ “connection between mind, body, spirit, and the divine.”
In coming back a second time, Shen Yun “really just spoke to me where I’m at right now. I felt like there wasn’t anything lost in today’s performance because I am exactly right here, where I need to be to receive these messages,” she said. “It’s timeless.”
What she will be taking home from the performance, Ms. Bent said, is the understanding that “we all carry the divine within us and we all came into this being, into this [life] knowing that.”
“I believe that we need to come back to a spiritual nature,” she said, adding that she hopes Shen Yun “resonates with people and they can just go out and be better human beings.”
