SYDNEY—Actress Genevieve Mooy has worked in theatre, television and film for more than 15 years, and is best known for her role as Jan Whelan in the Australian television series Breaking News. She has several film credits to her name, including Thank God He Met Lizzie, starring Cate Blanchett, and Denny Lawrence’s Emoh Ruo, for which she was nominated an Australian Film Institute Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role.
Ms. Mooy has also worked with many of Sydney’s major theatres, so when she sat in Sydney’s Capitol Theatre on Tuesday evening, Feb. 15, watching Shen Yun Performing Arts International Company, it was as both a spectator and a professional. And she was impressed.
“Exquisite. Extraordinary—and very intense in its expression,” she said during intermission. “The choreographer is fantastic, so beautiful … the dancing, the technique is extraordinary, so exquisite.”
Based in New York, Shen Yun Peforming Arts is the world’s premier classical Chinese dance and music company, with a mission to revive the true traditional culture of China—a heritage that the ancient Chinese believed to be bestowed by heaven.
“I wasn’t aware of the divinity sort of stories, and that is very interesting because then you start to look, [to] really examine all those stories,” Ms. Mooy said.
Though many of Shen Yun’s dance legends reflect the rich and diverse cultural landscape of ancient China, they also tell stories of contemporary life in China. The dances express the artists’ longing for their traditional culture, and real-life tales of life under an authoritarian state.
“I loved the contemporary [stories],” Ms. Mooy said, adding that she was intrigued by how a company from New York “would introduce the idea of what they feel about themselves and about where they’re in the world.” She said that she found it “fabulous.”
“The kind of literal edge is great. Then you get more dimension and more depth to the experience, which was great.”
Shen Yun’s rich program is accompanied by an orchestra that uniquely combines both Eastern and Western instruments. Ms. Mooy described the orchestra as “just superb.” “It is really very exciting to have an orchestra and the dancers and the story—it just complements the whole process.”
The classical music and singing particularly impressed Ms. Mooy, who found it very complementary to the classical Chinese dancing.
“I just love the singing because singing is, well, all the arts, but you get this idea of a particular style of singing which is very operatic, but is very much part of that community coming out of that culture, so it has a very interesting timbre … and it is very extreme in its expression and vibrato. So it is very fascinating to listen to that—it then supports the music with the dance. I really enjoyed those two counterpoints, getting the classical music and the classical singing. It was great.”
Reporting by Shar Adams and Rebecca Hunnisett.
Shen Yun Performing Arts International Company will perform at Sydney’s Capitol Theatre through to Feb. 23. Next stop is Melbourne, March 1-6. For more information, visit ShenYunPerformingArts.org
