MINNEAPOLIS—Sheri Lumley, executive director of the Minnesota Hearing Healthcare Providers, had a special experience when the erhu virtuoso of Shen Yun Performing Arts Touring Company took to the stage at the Orpheum Theatre in Minneapolis on Feb. 24.
“It made me, oh my goodness, I can’t even explain it. When she was playing that, I felt it from inside to the outside. It was so beautiful—I couldn’t even believe it. It was magical—I mean, it was magical. That was beautiful,” said Mrs. Lumley, who attended the performance with her family.
The experience was beyond words for Mrs. Lumley, but it included happiness and a feeling of connection to something greater.
During the performance, the emcees explained that the ancient Chinese believed music could act as medicine, resonating with it physically, mentally, and spiritually with the listener. Mrs. Lumley felt that described her experience exactly.
“Yes, yes, and I did, and that’s what I felt with that music,” she said. “I felt it, I felt it resonating throughout me ... It felt like it went through me. Every piece of my body was like singing with it, was playing with it. It was like my body and the music—the energy within my body was one with the music.”
Mrs. Lumley felt that “oneness” and spirituality were the essence of Shen Yun’s performance.
“It showed the beauty that is within people, and that there are some in government that are not good people and they are destroying that beauty, they are destroying that energy within people, the resonance that music has, they’re destroying it. And it’s not being allowed to show, it’s not being allowed to shine, and I think when you don’t have that music, and you don’t have that within people, you don’t have that connection. And they’re taking that connection away.”A Shen Yun production includes over a dozen vignettes, showing scenes from China’s 5,000 years to the present day. The company’s mission is to show the beauty and goodness of China’s divinely inspired civilization, whose culture lives on in people even in China today, though they are persecuted for having faith.
“They showed that these are the people, this is what we are, this is our energy, this is our being, this is who we are, and this is what the government has taken. It doesn’t allow this energy to be, and it’s taken from us, it’s destroyed, and it’s still alive in people though, and that is what it showed, it’s still alive,” she said.
Mr. Lumley said the China of the past was very spiritual, unlike China under communist rule.
“More than that, everybody was created by one Creator, and we’re all one people, and we should be able to shine, and I saw that,” he said. “There’s so much more in the past of China than what is going on today. Today everybody’s just going through emotion, they’re not living.”
“At the end, it was about God. You know, the Creator. It wasn’t about anything else—it was about that. It was about the divineness,” he said.
“That here is something greater than whatever governments can create. It is something greater. And no matter how you oppress people, in the end, we all got to answer to that divine master.”
