SAN FRANCISCO—Principal Architect and Co-owner of Shah Kawasaki Architects, Harish Shah, attended Shen Yun Performing Arts New York Company’s first of two shows scheduled for Saturday, Jan. 7 at the War Memorial Opera House, part of a 6-day, 7-show run in San Francisco. After the 2:00 p.m. showing Mr. Shah shared his impressions of the performance.
“If you really allow yourself, which I really tried a couple of times, to get absorbed, then you’re not going to be only an observer. I participated and transcended [the seats] becoming part of the act. Right away this started energy moving in my back. I felt that and it was quite real; it’s not created. I mean there’s something magical about it because I cannot explain why it is so,” he said.
Shen Yun performances feature a unique digital backdrop used as virtual set pieces throughout the show. Mr. Shah felt that he had a universal connection with this afternoon’s performance through that backdrop and he thought the backdrop added a participatory element to the show.
According to Mr. Shah, this large screen within the performances showed one nature: the sky, mountains, and landscape. “It gave me a sense of the scale of the human being with respect to its participation in nature, and how minuscule it is,” he said.
“The elements of divine essence and existence are not seen in our daily [lives] moment by moment, but they are participating in our lives. To depict those elements through the performing arts in a three dimensional way was beautiful. The divine figures come out of the screen, and the way they are depicted, the way they come alive on the stage, shows, throughout the performances, the connectivity between the two,” he said.
He felt that that aspect was always present in the performances, whether it was someone walking or dancing, there was always a universal aspect of the elements, which showed you that human existence—though really well connected to the universe, is, in some ways, minuscule.
Shen Yun’s program books state that the performance is about grace, compassion, and sublime beauty of heavenly realms that are shown through the subtlest expressions of its dancers.
Mr. Shah’s sense of Chinese culture as reflected through the arts is that it gives more credence to nature, with humans being part of nature, and that we must derive our existence in harmony with nature, in one way or another. “It’s being acknowledged [here],” he said. “It’s not being ignored.”
He thought the dance movements, while collaborative and collective, were also swift in their execution, yet very technical. “Each individual performer is part of the group and is intensely involved in its movement and sincerely doing it to create a collective choreography,” he said. “I really loved the colors of the costumes, the dance movements, and the play with fabrics. They were so purposeful.”
Mr. Shah thought the dance pieces must have been choreographed with the music and that you couldn’t separate them. “They’re all segments: the people playing music, the tone of their music, the up and down flow of the music goes really well with the movements of the dancers. This may be the reason the whole audience right now, as I see it, is really captivated—the performance has really mesmerized the group, as if the group is only one person,” he said. He felt the audience’s attention was a kind of “synchronization of audience and stage.”
“I literally—I felt my spinal cord was creating energy, moving up and down in my body while listening to this music,” he said.
The dance piece titled The Choice particularly struck Mr. Shah. “The situation in China that they show in that dance where a boy and a girl have come out of college and they are forced with bad, black energy—with dark and violent energy—to choose. The way the celestial world participates, flowing through the screen ... to me this requires very complex performance to really make this happen,” he said. “So the person who has visualized this had to have visualized the ’simultaneousness’ of it in order to put it in a performance.”
He felt connected to the performance. “I felt that it was not just a performance; it has meaning. [Shen Yun] puts so much meaning into the pieces that I can relate to the meaning. During my daily activities, I might not be exposed to this but now I am here experiencing each and every moment,” he said.
Mr. Shah thought that the performances were very disciplined, and artistically well thought through, yet at the same time very contemplative. “Every individual aspect, individual person dancing there was very much into the movements as if they are unaware of the next person dancing because they’re all so into it. So there’s a science that I feel like has been reflected here, which is a holistic science—a way of looking at life holistically,” he said.
