CINCINNATI—Austin Picklesimer, a safety manager in pharmaceuticals, and Stacey Picklesimer, an elementary school teacher, watched Shen Yun Performing Arts at the Aronoff Center for the Arts on March 3.

Based in New York, Shen Yun was founded in 2006 and is the world’s premier classical Chinese dance and music company. Since its inception, it has rapidly grown to eight equally sized companies that tour the world simultaneously. Shen Yun’s mission is to revive traditional Chinese culture, and the beauty and goodness of “China before communism.”

“I love the show,” Mr. Picklesimer said. “I’ve played music all my life, and hearing that different style was just amazing. It was excellent.”

“I like hearing it with the strings because it evoked an emotional reaction,” he added. “You could hear the joy or the sadness in the music, and I think that made a big difference for me … It’s just a different style than we’re used to here in Western culture, so it was pretty amazing.”

Mrs. Picklesimer praised the dancers’ skills and the beauty of their movements. Shen Yun’s name actually means “the beauty of divine beings dancing,” and according to Shen Yun’s website, classical Chinese dance is one of the most comprehensive dance systems in the world.

Mr. Picklesimer shared his thoughts on what he believed the message was in Shen Yun’s performance, as well as Shen Yun’s efforts to revive pre-communist Chinese traditions and values.

“I think their message is very accurate based on what we’ve seen and what we understand communism to be, and how it’s not the traditions,” he said. “The values that were previously there, they’re being taken away, and those freedoms [too].”

As an educator, Mrs. Picklesimer said that the values presented in Shen Yun are universal and can be shared by everyone—even children.

“A lot of the themes, it shows that they’re universal,” she said. “I work with children all day. It’s fun to see what we have in common. We have love, we all desire acceptance, we all desire comedy, and that’s universal.

“And I think that was the neat part about it, is not so much what we had different, but what we have in common.”