PARIS—With Shen Yun Performing Arts in the City of Light for a final series of performances until May 11, the audience at the Friday, May 2 performance was overwhelmed by the beauty that captured the Palais des Congrès.

For Olivier Joannès, Shen Yun was “very beautiful, very beautiful, quite surprising, very original”.

Mr. Joannès, a retired general manager of a subsidiary, has worked in France and Brazil and founded multiple companies.

“There isn’t just one story, there are actually many, 18 dance pieces, I think,” he said. “I was delighted by the artistic performance of the dancers.”

Shen Yun is the world’s premier classical Chinese dance company, with a mission to revive 5,000 years of Chinese civilization.

Mr. Joannès found the artists “quite exceptional.”

“Very nice music, good atmosphere, very spiritual too,” he added. “There’s very clearly a spiritual message that interests those who are open. You have to have an open heart to that.”

Audiences find that Shen Yun’s program depicts scenes of kindness, benevolence, and compassion through classical Chinese dance.

Mr. Joannès said he felt “a lot of goodness, beauty, and kindness.”

He added that Shen Yun’s revival of traditional culture has something to offer our modern world.

“I think it’s good that there are Chinese people who seek to perpetuate traditions, values that are indeed millennia-old values and that are essential to today’s world.”

Emmanuel Fiolet was among the packed audience at the Palais des Congrès on May 2.

“I traveled 300 kilometers on purpose to come and see the show today,” said Mr. Fiolet, who runs his own carpentry business in northern France.

“The show is divine,” he said. “How can you combine accuracy, poetry, and grace with so much power and skill in a single show ... every movement is extraordinary.”

Mr. Fiolet felt a connection with the divine “through the movements and sound effects. Each movement is extremely precise, and we feel a real poetry that leaves us yearning for the divinity behind it.”

As practitioners of the spiritual discipline Falun Gong, Shen Yun artists cultivate their spirituality by following the principles of truth, compassion, and tolerance on a daily basis. They meditate and study these principles together and explain that they believe inner improvement is important on the path to creating sublime art.

Mr. Fiolet felt this was evident.

“You can feel each dancer’s soul is pure,” Mr. Fiolet said. “It’s impressive. It gives us a real bubble of oxygen, in fact, a moment of wonder, which you don’t often find in dance shows.”

“We don’t know why, but we feel that the level is a notch higher. Very clearly,” he said.

“You can see that the troupe, by its history, by its presence here, simply, by its simple constitution, has something powerful within it,” Mr. Fiolet added. “There’s something behind it that encourages, every day, the efforts of every one of its members.”

“Some vignettes are about poetry. Others evoke human relationships, which spring up and move in the right direction, to put it simply. And other vignettes allow us to dream more, sometimes even with humorous overtones,” Mr. Fiolet said.

“I think today’s show can bring wisdom of spirit, tranquility, humanity to our world,” said Mr. Fiolet, who felt “appeased, very serene, very good” leaving the theater.

For this entrepreneur, it’s important “above all not to forget where we come from,” to remember “what our ancestors did so that we could be here today.”

“I’ve just experienced a real recreation, a little oxygen bubble that completely transported me thousands of kilometers away from here, without having moved,” he said. “I’m very, very, very happy to have taken part in this show.”

Another spectator at the May 2 performance, Jean-Marie Le Bourdais, found Shen Yun “magnificent.” For this retired business executive, the classical Chinese dance performance had “a lot of grace, a lot of finesse, and it’s majestic.”

“The colors are magnificent, and I’m in for a very nice surprise,” Mr. Le Bourdais said. “I’m discovering a little bit of this art that I didn’t know much about.

Mr. Le Bourdais found the artistic level of the dancers “extraordinary,” noting in particular “the graceful and supple side” of the artists.

“You don’t get the impression that they’re trying too hard, and you can see that it’s very well performed, very, very well orchestrated, very, very well done.”

Shen Yun was founded in 2006 in New York. Independent of any government, the non-profit organizations bring together leading artists from all over the world.

“It’s a show ... that deserves to be seen internationally,” Mr. Le Bourdais said. “And the stories are very touching, very, very touching. The numbers are marvelous, and you understand everything, without a single word being spoken. It’s magnificent.”

Every year, Shen Yun’s programs include at least one performance on a subject highly sensitive in China, which is currently dominated by communism. The company uses the arts to tell this important story, and this is one of the reasons why Shen Yun cannot perform in China.

“I think that the story of what’s happening in China can also be represented internationally, and that’s a great eye-opener,” Mr. Le Bourdais said.

For him, Shen Yun “can bring about a beautiful dialogue with different cultures.

“And frankly, it’s good to see. It’s good for us, it’s appeasing, especially in today’s very difficult global context,” Mr. Le Bourdais said.