Tansie Bennetts, who works in production in the film industry, praised Shen Yun after attending Perth’s last performance of the year with her parents at The Regal Theatre, on Feb. 23.
“It was amazing, really mind-blowing,” she said. “Just beautiful.”
New York-based Shen Yun’s program of classical Chinese dance, live orchestra music, and 3D animated artwork brings to life China’s 5,000-year history of divinely inspired civilization.
Bennetts could feel the divinity of traditional Chinese culture through the music.
“You get almost a kind of floaty, euphoric feeling,” she said. “You could listen to that for a really long time. You knew that it would be something deep and meaningful and that it would have a good message to share.”
Two bilingual emcees also helped interpret, in both Chinese and English, the meaning of Shen Yun as “the beauty of divine beings dancing.”
“I really liked how they explained the name Shen Yun and what it meant, and about the beauty through movement,” Bennetts said. “That expression was really quite amazing, how people can display their beliefs, their culture, and they can display so much soul and heart through simple things like movement and dance. It was really special.”
Jo Nova, a science communicator, watched the performance on Feb. 21, and said she was captivated by the way Shen Yun combines the best of Eastern and Western performing arts.
“It’s just brilliant to watch, I found myself thinking that but also thinking back through the thousands of years and wondering about the East and West, the things that China had seeded across to the West and the things that the West had seeded across to China,” she said. “I found myself wondering how much of ballet was influenced by Chinese dance.”
The Wentworth Report editor David Evans found Shen Yun’s exposition of the destructive nature of communism to be surprisingly refreshing.
“I thought it was quite a good thing, a breath of fresh air … it was not like any Chinese performance that I have ever seen before, much better than I expected,” he said. “I was very impressed with their athleticism and it all flowed,” Evans said. “It all sort of had a meditative feel to it all, it was harmonizing quite well. I was struck by the parallels between sort of notions of heaven and harmony, and what’s good and what’s bad that parallel what we have in the West.”
“It’s top class, it lives up to the adjective of a world class [show],” Evans said. “It was a very well done production, very sharp production values.”
NTD News, Perth, Australia
