NEW YORK—Shen Yun Performing Arts opened its second New York run of 2019 on March 6, to a sold-out audience at Lincoln Center.
“The colors catch you at first,” said Stephen Kenny, vice president at a Fortune 500 Company. “But the synchronization of the dancers that they all jump at the same time, they move at the same time it’s almost picture perfect, it’s inspiring.
“It makes you want to go back and actually read Chinese history to know where those stories came from,” said Kenny. “The myths or the legends that led to the dances.”
“It generates in me straight away an interest to go and investigate a little bit more,” said Kenny. “The Ming dynasty everybody is broadly familiar with, but some of the others epochs they were talking about I was unaware.”
Shen Yun is unable to perform in mainland China, due to the Chinese Communist regime viewing China’s divinely inspired traditional culture as an ideological threat.
“A dance troupe like this performing traditional Chinese dance, isn’t dancing in its own country, there’s something wrong.”
Culture and History
Audience members expressed appreciation for the culture and history portrayed in the performance.
“I love it, it’s beautiful, it’s artistic, but not only that it really captures what art is supposed to be, an expression,” said Iveta Stantcheva, a consultant at a Fortune 500 Company. “I really sense the true expression of both political unrest and just everything that’s going on in China. So it really is a beautiful performance, it’s so artistic, I’m in love with it.”
“I think it’s a great show,” said Brad Starkweather, Senior Vice President at AST Financial. “It mixes in a lot of great things as I said before, it has a mixture of a lot of different arts and there’s not a lot of shows that do that. And I also don’t think there’s a lot of shows with this type of culture and background that we get to see. So it’s very entertaining.”
NTD News, New York