PITTSBURGH—Sherri Adelkoff attended Shen Yun Performing Arts at the Benedum Center for the Performing Arts.
Ms. Adeloff loved the stories: “Although some of the stories are not happy stories, but they’re [stories] that need to be told.”
In her position as Deputy Chief Staff Attorney of the Superior Court of Pennsylvania, West District, Ms. Adeloff was aware of the live organ harvesting in China by the communist regime and said she would talk to her friends about it.
Based in New York, Shen Yun was founded by leading Chinese artists, who made it their mission to revive traditional Chinese culture through classical Chinese dance and music.
According to the Shen Yun website, China was once known as the “Land of the Divine” and, although it was deeply spiritual, Chinese culture was suppressed by the atheist communist party that took power in 1949.
Through classical Chinese dance, Shen Yun tells stories from ancient China up to the present day.
“The message that I get from it is that people should understand not just what’s going on in China, but how valuable freedom is to those countries in the world that are free,” Ms. Adeloff said.
“They need to fight for their freedom because ... that’s a really fine line, you know, like one day you’re free, one day you’re not,” she said. “It’s really easy for people to forget because they’re not seeing it. So to come on a Sunday afternoon like I did to see a production that’s entertaining but also educational, in so far as what in the world is going on in the world, in China, that’s really important. It’s very important.”
“I loved it for that. It had a big impact on me,” she said.
Preserving History
A behavioralist specialist at a healthcare company Ray Baker and his companion noted the importance of telling a story to preserve history.
“The importance of this is: it’s not only telling a story, it’s preserving it—it’s preserving the history,” he said.
Mr. Baker said he liked that in the performances, higher beings came down to the earth to save people. “I thought it was interesting because it’s very similar to the story of Jesus in the West, so I get it; it’s really cool.”
Mr. Baker summed it up: “It’s just a wonderful display of dance and music, I think, through a historical lens and I think it’s just wonderful!”
Reported by William Huang, Frank Liang, and Yvonne Marcotte.
The Epoch Times is a proud sponsor of Shen Yun Performing Arts. We have covered audience reactions since Shen Yun’s inception in 2006.
