SAN ANTONIO—James Pearce felt transported for two hours as Shen Yun Performing Arts told otherworldly stories from traditional Chinese culture through dance.
One was an excerpt from the famous Chinese novel “Journey to the West,” and another was a famous love story involving celestial fairies and the Queen Mother of Heaven.
“There were stories of redemption … and stories of good triumphs over evil,” said Mr. Pearce, a local business owner, at the Tobin Center for the Performing Arts on Dec. 31. “It was like a Romeo and Juliet but with a happy ending. And happy endings and good triumphs over evil was the message that I got.”
New York-based Shen Yun is the world’s premier classical Chinese dance company, with a mission to share ‘China before communism’ with the world.
“The dancing was remarkable. Very, very talented dancers, actors,” said Mr. Pearce.
Classical Chinese dance is an ancient art form that has been refined over thousands of years into the complete and comprehensive dance system it is today. Its emphasis on a dancer’s inner bearing makes it a highly expressive form suitable for storytelling, and the dance also requires mastery of highly difficult tumbling techniques from which acrobatics and gymnastics originate.
Each Shen Yun production includes a little over a dozen vignettes and more than stories: bel canto soloists, folk and ethnic dances highlighting that China has some 50 ethnic minority groups, and an orchestra incorporating ancient Chinese instruments, to name some.
“The music was wonderful,” Mr. Pearce said. “The costumes were very powerful.”
Mr. Pearce noted the references to the Creator in the program and the spirituality of the traditional Chinese culture.
He said he thought it showed “compassion and to open people’s hearts and to maybe accept that there is something else out there that can help them find their way.”
“The message is very important, I think. There’s a lot of evil in the world, especially in China, where people are not allowed to practice spiritual practices for fear of death. And then also with the Communist Party taking over China in the 1920s, everything was wiped out, all the culture, and they weren’t allowed,” he said.
China experienced several civil wars in the 1920s, and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) eventually took power in 1949. In its 75-year rule, it continued to launch violent revolutions periodically, sought to destroy traditional Chinese culture, and banned religions not controlled by the Party.
Mr. Pearce said it was difficult to overstate the extent of the damage done to the Chinese society and tried to draw a Western comparison.
“A hundred years have passed, and people have no idea of what their history was like. And the only thing I can compare that to would be if World War II would have gone a different way and all of Europe’s contributions were wiped out, starting with the ancient Greece and Rome. And then they would never know about Mozart or Beethoven or the works of Shakespeare and all of that gone, and we would just never, as a Western world, would have never been exposed to it,” he said.
“That’s very sad because they have a very, very rich culture, and the Chinese people are struggling very much, very economically. It’s a very poor country. From what I understand, it’s living hand-to-mouth and a very oppressive government. Hopefully, things will start to change,” Mr. Pearce said.
Because Shen Yun shows China before communism, the artists have been blacklisted by the Chinese communist regime and cannot travel to China without repercussion. In fact, many of the founding artists of Shen Yun had fled religious persecution by the regime because they practice Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, a spiritual discipline that teaches “truth, compassion, and forbearance.”
Now, newly leaked internal documents revealed that Shen Yun has become one of the top “targets” for overseas religious persecution by the Chinese Communist Party.
“I had heard that the CCP was trying to ban, put pressure on the venues and different people involved to suppress it even in the U.S. so that it couldn’t go on in the U.S. and they wouldn’t be able to perform in the U.S.,” Mr. Pearce said. “And that’s very sad that they have that much power over, even in the U.S.”
Mr. Pearce commended the artists’ dedication to their mission and ability to bring audience members like him an experience that was “just amazing.”
“It’s a very, very beautiful show, and everyone, I’m sure, worked very, very hard to put it on,” he said. “The whole show was just very inspirational.”
Reporting by Nancy Ma and Catherine Yang.
The Epoch Times is a proud sponsor of Shen Yun Performing Arts. We have covered audience reactions since Shen Yun’s inception in 2006.
From The Epoch Times
