SÃO PAULO, Brazil—Businessman Luciano Barbieri was a little anxious before seeing Shen Yun Performing Arts, unsure of what to expect. After attending New York-based Shen Yun’s opening night performance in São Paolo at the Teatro Bradesco on March 17, he was thrilled.
“The feeling is amazing, you can tell they are very excited about doing this,” said Mr. Barbieri, who owns three companies. “They train a lot ... their interaction with the backdrop is amazing. And we can watch this and get the feeling that we are also part of the show. It’s amazing how they train and are synchronized. The colors are so pretty and everything! It’s all really cool—it’s amazing.”
Shen Yun is the world’s premier classical Chinese dance company, yet it cannot perform in China.
This was new information for Mr. Barbieri, seeing Shen Yun for the first time.
“We know a little and hear about communism here, but we didn’t imagine that, for example, a show like this could not be performed in China. [It] is very difficult to imagine how it is for the people. But at the same time, it’s really nice that you can have this in other places and show this culture to so many people who don’t know it, like us here in São Paulo,” he said.Though the culture was new to Mr. Barbieri, he felt the values were quite universal.
“These are values that we have to practice at home,” he said.
The performance highlighted truth, compassion, tolerance, loyalty, wisdom, and courage—traditional values that were inherent to the deeply spiritual 5,000-year Chinese civilization, as well as traditional cultures the world over.
China once centered its ways of living around the concept of harmony between heaven, earth, and humankind, and Mr. Barbieri was interested to learn that the culture, quite different from modern China, was so spiritual.
“It’s very nice to see that even with all this difficulty imposed by communism, they still want to show this culture to the rest of the world. Even with all the difficulties and repressions that they are suffering there ... the Chinese people still want to participate and show this,” he said.
“[The values] were lost over time. And it’s really cool that through shows like this, you want to bring that back so that we remember more and more, and pass it onto our children, to our families, so that we have a better world in the future.”
Reporting by Mary Mann.
The Epoch Times is a proud sponsor of Shen Yun Performing Arts. We have covered audience reactions since Shen Yun’s inception in 2006.
