STRASBOURG, France—On Monday Jan. 20, the capital of the Grand-Est region in France was delighted to welcome Shen Yun Performing Arts for the first time.
“It’s truly exceptional,” said Lucien Walther, a former executive in the sanitation sector. “Beautiful choreography! Sensational music! Great musicians and great dancers—the costumes are beautiful and the choreography is magnificent.”
Mr. Walther was also delighted to rediscover “traditional, ancestral values, since this is China a few thousand years ago”.
According to Mr. Walther, New York-based Shen Yun was a vehicle for “values that have been somewhat lost and that it would be good to rediscover today.”
New York-based Shen Yun is the world’s premier classical Chinese dance company, and has a mission to show audiences the beauty of China before communism through music and dance.
“It’s a lot of fun! It’s really very attractive, very entertaining,” said Sylvain Martino, director of a power distribution company. The engineer raved about the artistic level of the show: “It’s fabulous. You can see that a lot of hard work goes into it. We appreciate the work and I think there are years of practice behind it.”
Mr. Martino said he felt “a lot of emotions.”
“It’s both joy and excitement. It’s a multitude of emotions that collide, and it’s very pleasant,” he said.
Also in the audience was Laetitia Kuhn, who said she “loved the show.”
“It was so beautiful! Lots of colors. It was very impressive, and very sporty too,” said the materials engineer.
“Very ethereal”, agreed Yannick Kuhn, her husband, a programming engineer.
The young woman was keen to discover “another world of dance.”
“It’s really magnificent,” she said.
The couple enjoyed discovering ancient Chinese melodies, and songs performed in the authentic bel canto style, such as one performed by soprano Tian Li.
Mr. Kuhn said, “It’s very impressive! The voice carries so much, you really feel it when you see it live.”
The Kuhns were surprised by the contemporary scenes in the story-based fances. In addition to scenes depicting the legends and millennia-old history of China, Shen Yun exposes the brutal persecution suffered by practitioners of the Falun Dafa meditation discipline in contemporary communist China. Falun Dafa, also known as Falun Gong, teaches the three principles of truth, compassion, and forbearance.
“I think we’ve grown up in a culture where we’re free to think,” saud Mr. Kuhn. “There are still countries where it’s very, very censored and these are things we don’t know at all, so it’s part of the culture to discover ... to understand also how it is happening elsewhere ... It’s an important message.”
Shen Yun brings 5,000 years of Chinese culture and history to life, and the young engineering couple were sensitive to this.“
It’s very important to still have traces of culture, to still pass on this kind of thing,“ said Mr. Kuhn. ”Failure to impart our culture is tantamount to losing our history. And it’s important to know where you’ve come from in order to know where you’re going.”
