METAIRIE, La.—Airline pilot Timothy Kurtz has made many trips to Asia in his career, so he is no stranger to Chinese culture.

Stepping out of the Jefferson Performing Arts Center at the end of the evening, the couple had great things to say about the company.

“Just the grace and beauty of it—obviously, it’s a culture that’s different from ours, and so getting to experience just a little taste of it, to get to see the expression of it over the thousands of years and the beautiful dancing and beautiful music—it’s a great experience. Just a wonderful experience,” Mr. Kurtz exclaimed.

For 5,000 years, China’s civilization flourished under the shared belief that the divine will bless those who uphold traditional moral values. Tragically, within just a few decades of the communist party’s violent takeover, these beliefs were erased and replaced with atheism.

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The performance was “a beautiful way to experience truth and beauty that we all share in common,” she stated. The costumes and the colors “were phenomenal.”

As devout Roman Catholics, the couple appreciated the show’s incorporation of spirituality and noticed that traditional Chinese culture shared many similarities with their own beliefs.

“The expression of freedom, the freedom of religion, and the ability to believe in something beyond the state is where we look for inspiration and guidance,” Mr. Kurtz expressed.

Reflecting on the ongoing religious persecutions in China, he explained that there’s been “exceptional cruelty and disregard for humanity that we’ve seen from communism since the beginning—whether that’s in Russia or dating back to the earliest denial of the divine.”

“People are just things to be used when you don’t have an expression of God or an expression of the divine. So, really, what you see is a continuation of what we saw from the worst of humanity in Russia and now in China,” Mr. Kurtz said.

“It was awesome. I loved it,” Mrs. Kurtz shared. “I was nervous at first that it would be a distraction from the art of the dance, but it added to it, and I thought it was gorgeous. It transports you a little bit further off the stage and into a different realm.”

“It was extremely dynamic. So, it was very enjoyable,” Mr. Kurtz chimed in. “All the storytelling was really wonderful. [Shen Yun] was a wonderful experience.”