SHEN YUN PERFORMING ARTS REVIEWS

Costa Mesa Audience Members See Traditional Values in Shen Yun

Mar 01, 2023

COSTA MESA, Calif.—If there was scale to compare the dangers of smartphones and the convenience they bring us, which one would outweigh which?

“I think they’re common to all people at some level. We get distracted by what goes on around us. We get swept up now in an era of media where it touches people’s lives so much and has so much sway even from birth now,” said Jimmy Becker, a musician. For Mr. Becker, Shen Yun Performing Arts helped viewers remember the values that make us human. He and his wife Michelle attended Shen Yun at the Segerstrom Center for the Arts on Feb. 28.

Shen Yun is based in New York, and its mission is to present a China before communism to the world. What the performance also accomplished for the Beckers was showing how beautiful life was when people spoke face to face rather than through social media.

“I think it’s very easy to get distracted from the real being and distracted from the truth about the people around them. And we lose sight of that sometimes. And I thought there was a really nice emphasis on that, especially toward the end, bringing that back ... just us all being there for each other and getting in tune to who we really are,” said Mr. Becker.

As a musician, Mr. Becker had only compliments for Shen Yun’s orchestra.

“That music was really good. And I liked the combination of some of the traditional [Chinese] instruments and the traditional Western instruments. I thought it was really great. The orchestra was great,” he said.

Shen Yun’s dancers are trained in classical Chinese dance. Shen Yun’s own choreographers create a set of new dances each year so that Shen Yun can present an all new production.

“They were fantastic. It was dazzling to watch. Their choreography was phenomenal. How does somebody grab their foot, raise their leg completely vertically and still touch their toes and not lose their balance? And how do you get 15 or 16 people to do that in sync? It was amazing. The athleticism that went along with the dance was really, really something to watch,” said Mr. Becker.

“I thought it was very lovely. It was very beautiful. The costumes and the dancing and the music was astounding,” said Michelle Becker, a software developer.

China was once a place filled with a belief in the divine, and the Beckers saw that in Shen Yun.

“I thought it was interesting, the emphasis on the divine and the spiritual awareness that we have in this world, or the spiritual reality we all have in the world that we all share in common. I thought that was really wonderful,” said Mr. Becker.

Reporting by Linda Jiang and Maria Han.

The Epoch Times is a proud sponsor of Shen Yun Performing Arts. We have covered audience reactions since Shen Yun’s inception in 2006.