ATLANTA—Atlanta City Councilmember Michael Julian Bond attended the opening night of Shen Yun Performing Arts on Dec. 23 at Atlanta Symphony Hall in order to personally present the artists with a proclamation on behalf of the city council.

“You know, proclamations from the city of Atlanta are the highest awards that the city can present to a person, a place, or an event,” he said after seeing the performance. “This fits the bill.”

“These performers, the mission of Shen Yun, all of this, holds to what Atlanta values, and that is the highest expression ... of demonstrating through art, through music, through performance, the beauty of what’s in our hearts and mankind,” Mr. Bond said.

“The city of Atlanta is recognizing that and wanting to lend our voice in support of the mission of Shen Yun.”

“It was just magnificent and overwhelming,” he said. “I mean it was really, really phenomenal.”

Mr. Bond said it was a personally moving and tremendous evening, and from the joy on the faces of audience members all around him, he believed they felt the same.

“The people here tonight, everybody is just—you can see the impact on the faces of everyone who’s attended. It’s just been phenomenal,” he said.

From the dancing to the costumes, to the orchestra performing original compositions in sync with the dance, to the colors, animated backdrop, bel canto, and stories, everything worked together to create something powerful, Mr. Bond said. It was a performance of immense talent and highly precise, and also evocative and emotional, he added.

“Every part of this performance was as near to perfect as a human being can imagine,” Mr. Bond said. “It was a very, very, very tremendous experience.”

“I am just personally moved. I believe that it’s an expression physically through the choreography, physically through the performance of the music, physically through the demonstration and performance as a voice, trying to demonstrate and ascend beyond the regular human experience,” he said.

Mr. Bond, who once presented a similar proclamation to the Dalai Lama, said he has long had an interest in Buddhism and saw some Buddhist themes in the traditional Chinese culture presented by Shen Yun.

“It was just powerful, about the transformation of someone who had participated in a tragedy and then was able to have themselves uplifted out of that ... and then turn the life around and to aspire to something greater,” he said of one of the dance pieces.

They were universal themes and stories, Mr. Bond said, and in another dance, he was reminded of stories from Christianity and Judaism, like the story of Moses parting the Red Sea.

It depicted divine intervention, he explained, “to come in and intervene for human beings and to deliver them to a safer place, a higher place, a more aspirational place.”

“It was extremely powerful,” he said.

“We want you to come back often, and to keep going and to keep extending this message all around the world,” he said.