“I’ve been coming [to see Shen Yun for] many years. … I came for curiosity years ago and heard a lot about it. I’m a very, very longtime immigrated Chinese, living overseas for the better part of 40 years. Coming to Shen Yun each year makes me a very proud Chinese. In a matter of two hours, you get to enjoy 5,000 years of tradition.”

“Not only the costumes are beautiful, the music is amazing. It also brings back a lot of the culture that I knew and I lost. It makes me a very proud Chinese person. There’s a lot of the part of the culture that Shen Yun managed to demonstrate to us that’s been suppressed, that the rest of the world doesn’t know, and I think what this show managed to do is to tell the world who we really are and what we really do, and I’m very happy with that.”

“The colourful costumes, the precision of all the performers—it doesn’t look to me that they made one mistake tonight, there is none. The performance, the instruments, the orchestra, the opera singer—they are just absolutely amazing. The time they put in to bring themselves to this world-class level of perfection and performance, you don’t see that very often in many, many other shows.”

“In a matter of two hours, you’re getting thousands of years of stories. And for me, who grew up in the Orient as a kid and came to Canada very young, this absolutely brought back memories of history class when I was 8 years old. This is just amazing. It’s a must-see for anybody.”

“[The traditional values portrayed are] 100 percent relevant and it’s really, really important for us. These values go well beyond being a Chinese person. … It makes me feel really, really good spending two hours watching it. I go home a very happy person and I’ll do something good tomorrow after this.”