SHEN YUN PERFORMING ARTS REVIEWS

Shen Yun Is Divine, Say Toronto Theatregoers

Apr 05, 2023

TORONTO, Canada—Shen Yun Performing Arts’ name means “the beauty of divine being,” which Igor Vujanic, a dentist, and his wife Mira Vujanic, a painter, found very apt when they watched Shen Yun at the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts on April. 4.

“[It’s] beautiful,” said Mr. Vujanic. “The music and dance, it’s beautiful. The name explains everything—divine. It’s divine.”

Based in New York, Shen Yun was founded in 2006 and is the world’s premier classical Chinese dance and music company. Now with eight equally sized companies touring the world simultaneously, Shen Yun’s mission is to revive traditional Chinese culture.

The couple shared that since it was their first time seeing Shen Yun, they hadn’t known what to expect. They were by no means disappointed, and Mrs. Vujanic, who described the performance as stunning, said that they “loved all of the presentation and the variation of dance, the singing, the group, [and each] individual.”

As an artist herself, Mrs. Vujanic felt that she had personal experience watching the performance. She said that she saw art as an expression of a deeper connection to the self and that this was something she saw in Shen Yun’s performance as well.

“I feel like it’s some connection to something that’s more than just who we are as these physical beings,” she said.

Mrs. Vujanic added that as an artist, “it’s important to come out and see these types of things, especially when you connect to different forms of art, like dance, something that will obviously come out in my own paintings, afterwards, when it all settles in.”

Mrs. Vujanic said that she also enjoyed Shen Yun’s patented animated backdrop.

“We loved it; we’ve never seen that either,” she said. “It’s interesting because it’s a new mix of technology and art and sort of live art, which is also nice because welcoming the different mediums as they come together is important in the art world too.”

Mrs. Vujanic also saw something deeply meaningful in the combination of traditional Chinese and Western instruments in Shen Yun’s live orchestra.

“I think it’s beautiful,” she said. “It’s important because, in terms of who we are, I think it’s really nice to hold on to all the positive differences that we have but continue to remember that we’re all connected. So that’s … a beautiful thing.”

“When you do something like that, where you celebrate your individuality but blend it with something else, that creates more of a connection—I think that’s how we encourage the youth today too, to love themselves, but make sure that their own self-love then continues outwardly, which they (Shen Yun) talked about too. This whole thing about having a beautiful life—it is love, loving first you and then everything else around you.”

Reporting by Lisa Li, Andrew Chen, and Wandi Zhu.

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