SHEN YUN PERFORMING ARTS REVIEWS

Moved to Tears by Emotion, Sense of Connection With Shen Yun: Canberra Singer

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Moved to Tears by Emotion, Sense of Connection With Shen Yun: Canberra Singer
Award-winning singer-songwriter Lee J. Collier attends Shen Yun Performing Arts at the Canberra Theatre Centre in Australia on March 5, 2024. NTDTV
CANBERRA, Australia—Singer-songwriter Lee J. Collier said she felt overwhelmed by the high calibre of artists in Shen Yun Performing Arts as they electrified the stage of the Canberra Theatre Centre on the evening of March 5.

“I actually cried all the way through from the emotion and the connection from the performers on stage to the people in the audience,” she said. “The beauty of the performance was very … it was overwhelming.”

New York-based Shen Yun is on its 2024 global tour to showcase the beauty and richness of the 5,000 years culture of “China before communism.” Shen Yun is currently performing in Australia, with one more performance in Canberra, followed by more in Sydney and Perth.
“You can tell that, obviously, they’ve had decades of discipline to be able to execute the movements of the dance and the performance. It was very passionate,” the award-winning singer said.

Trauma Transformed to Beauty

Ms. Collier also expressed surprise that some of the stories performed by Shen Yun were in relation to Falun Gong and learned that many Shen Yun artists also follow the Falun Gong spiritual practice, which, as the story explains, teaches adherents to live by the universal principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance.

The entertainer said she was familiar with Falun Gong from seeing them petition for quite a few years in front of the Chinese embassy in Canberra due to China’s ruling Chinese Communist Party persecuting practitioners and subjecting prisoners of conscience to the horrible crime of organ harvesting.

“I am aware of what’s happening with the organ harvesting in China and the evil that is happening. So to have a performance by this dance troupe and to be able to provide people with the message of what is going on—but in such a creative, artistic way—is so powerful,” she said.

“With the arts, people come to be entertained. It is important, obviously, because we need a bit of escapism to be able to get out of our humdrum life. But to be able to do this is so intelligently creative because it’s entertaining, but it has such a powerful message. And that’s really important.”

She offered Shen Yun’s performers “big love and hugs,” especially after finding out that many of them on stage have actually “come from a background with trauma,” she said.

“And if not them, their parents or their family members. And so, they have risen, they have taken that pain, and they’ve taken that trauma, and they’ve been able to do something that’s really important and absolutely beautiful.”

A ‘Lovely Combination of Joy and Pain’

Ms. Collier had high praise for Shen Yun’s artistic director.
“And I just absolutely adored the graphics and how clever that was,” she said of Shen Yun’s patented effect for stage performances, where the performers interact with a digital background.
“The dancers stepped off the back of the stage, and then they’re on the screen,” Ms. Collier marvelled. Ms. Collier is best known for her song “65 Roses,” which she wrote for families impacted by cystic fibrosis.

“The artistic director really nailed it. It was just such fabulous storytelling. And it was a really lovely combination of joy and pain,” she said of the range of emotions felt by the audience through Shen Yun’s numerous vignettes.

“The message that came through, ultimately, was that good will prevail, and we as a species on the planet need to eradicate the evil. So I think this is just such an important message. And to be able to provide that through the arts is just so powerful and so moving,” she said.

“Just a massive congratulations to all of you. This is just so important, and I’m just so honoured to have been here tonight.

“The whole thing was five-star, ten-star, a million-star. You need to get out and see it,” she said.

Reporting by NTD, Isabel Wang, Rebecca Zhu, and Melanie Sun.
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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