SHEN YUN PERFORMING ARTS REVIEWS

Lawyer Sees Connection Between Chinese and Western Cultures After Watching Shen Yun

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Lawyer Sees Connection Between Chinese and Western Cultures After Watching Shen Yun
Brian Holt attended Shen Yun Performing Arts at Rosemont Theatre in Rosemont, Illinois on March 17, 2024. Stacey Tang/The Epoch Times
ROSEMONT, Ill.—Brian Holt, a lawyer, watched Shen Yun Performing Arts at Rosemont Theatre on March 17 with his wife and young children. During the intermission, he shared what he felt about the first half of the performance.

“It’s beautiful so far. It’s been fantastic,” said Mr. Holt. “You never know if kids are going to stay awake and watch it, but they love it. They love being exposed to a different culture, and so they’re having a wonderful time.”

Based in New York, Shen Yun was founded in 2006 by leading Chinese artists and quickly became the world’s premier classical Chinese dance and music company. Now, with eight equally sized companies that tour the world simultaneously, Shen Yun is on a mission to revive traditional Chinese culture and the beauty of China before communism.

Although Mr. Holt did not know very much about pre- and post-communist China, he was able to identify some of the differences between the two respective societies.

“In communism … there’s a lot of oppression of different cultures, different ideas, descent, religion, whereas it seems that pre-communism was much more open to different cultures, different religions, different beliefs, different ideas, descent,” said Mr. Holt.

“So my impression of what I’m seeing [in Shen Yun] is pre-communism where people were free to express ideas, express different thoughts about religion, life, philosophy, just more open.”

Mr. Holt also praised the artistry of traditional Chinese culture, acknowledging the influence Chinese culture has had on other cultures around the world.

“Artistically, it’s amazing,” he said. “It feels like there’s a lot of stuff that we see in different cultures that are probably derived from traditional Chinese culture that have sort of slowly influenced the rest of the world … Maybe because we have less education and less opportunity to see what’s happening in China, we don’t necessarily know that some of the foundational things that we see actually come from traditional Chinese culture.”

“The dance, the colors, a lot of the movements that we see that maybe we don’t realize actually has a foundation in China, and if we could be more exposed to it, maybe we would see that we have more similarities than we realize, and maybe less differences.”

According to Shen Yun’s website, the ancient Chinese believed that their culture was a gift from the Heavens, and Shen Yun’s opening piece depicts divine beings following the Creator down to Earth to establish Chinese civilization. Mr. Holt once again saw similarities between Chinese culture and other cultures.

“I thought it was interesting,” he said.
“I think that each culture has a very rich, unique sort of creation mythology that I think we should all be exposed to. I think it shows that a lot of our belief systems are very similar, even though we maybe grow up thousands and thousands of miles away. We have a lot of similarities in our own creation myths, which I think we should look to that to say, how do two or three different cultures that grow up thousands of years apart and thousands of miles away have very similar creation myths should tell us something about ourselves.”
Reporting by Stacey Tang and Wandi Zhu.

The Epoch Times is a proud sponsor of Shen Yun Performing Arts. We have covered audience reactions since Shen Yun’s inception in 2006.

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