ST.PETERSBURG, Fla.—IT company founder and CEO Josh Holcombe and his wife, Lisa, a nurse, attended Shen Yun Performing Arts for the first time on Feb. 7, at the Duke Energy Center for the Arts. The couple was both awed by the beauty of Shen Yun and surprised to learn that something so magnificent is banned in communist China.
“It’s amazing. I love the traditional dance. I love the traditional culture,” Mr. Holcombe exclaimed. “I’m stunned that [the Chinese Communist Party] doesn’t like it over there.”
“It’s beautiful. Absolutely beautiful,” Mrs. Holcombe chimed in. The dancers are “absolutely stunning. [They] make me want to take up out tonight and go dancing.”
She was particularly captivated by the piece featuring dancers with long, flowing sleeves that billowed gracefully across the stage, like the gentle movement of water. According to Shen Yun’s website, these sleeves were a part of ancient Chinese feminine attire representing humility and grace.
“They’re top tier, for sure. Very elegant,” she said. “I love the long sleeves, and just the way [the performance] all comes together is absolutely beautiful. Very heavenly, very bright, very cultural.”
Shen Yun is the world’s premier classical Chinese dance and music company. Presenting a brand-new set of programs each year, the company has been delighting audiences around the world since 2006.
For thousands of years, Chinese people lived with a deep belief in the divine, and their values and daily lives were guided by the teachings of Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism. Following the communist regime’s rise to power, however, atheism was imposed, and traditional culture was pushed to the brink of extinction.
Today, these New York–based artists are working to revive China’s 5,000 years of divinely inspired culture and share with the world the beauty of China before communism.
Mr. Holcombe believes this mission is very important because drifting away from traditional culture is “one of the reasons America declines in a lot of ways.”
“Our country was founded with religion and God, and I think that’s core to how we grow,” he said.
His biggest takeaway from the performance was the idea that society will “always circle back.”
“We [will] try to come back to those traditions, and that’s what makes us who we are,” he said. “I think [Shen Yun shows] a way to get back to our roots—eliminating the politics and getting back down to where we really came from.”
Mrs. Holcombe also appreciated the spiritual element of the performance. For her, Shen Yun is about “beauty and [going] back to where we came from and finding the joy in that—even the heavenly portion of it—and what’s good.
“It’s all beautiful. Very spiritual,” she said. The depiction of heaven “makes me feel good inside. We put God first in everything that we do in our life, and [Shen Yun] is a portrait of that.”
