MONTPELLIER, France—Who better than a dancer to fully appreciate the classical Chinese dance of Shen Yun Performing Arts? Dancer and dance instructor Célia Gratias saw Shen Yun for the first time on March 26, and shared her impressions of the performance she saw at the Corum in Montpellier.
As a classically trained dancer, Ms. Gratias said she loved Shen Yun.
“I didn’t see the time go by,” said Ms. Gratias, a classically trained dancer who has worked with ballets at the Metz, Nice, and Rouen operas. Ms. Gratias has since set up her own dance and musical comedy school, passing on her passion to 160 students.
“I really liked the fact that it wasn’t just dance, but that there was singing as well, and that there was an orchestra. For me, that’s essential,” Ms. Gratias added.
The classical and jazz dance teacher described the Shen Yun dancers as “incredibly synchronous.”
“You can tell there’s a lot of work behind it. You can feel that it’s not France,“ she said with a laugh. She admired the dancers’ precision, which she said was ”simply, it’s to the millimeter!”
What Shen Yun accomplished was not achieved through only practice, she added. In Ms. Gratias’s opinion, a particular benevolence emanates from the dancers.
“I think that in order to achieve this quality of symbiosis and synchronization, there has to be benevolence,” she said. In fact, she appreciated the fact that Shen Yun did not feature the hierarchical structure of the dancers she had come to know, with the prima ballerina taking up all the space, obliterating the other dancers. “I think that’s important.”
Ms. Gratias found the scenography “simply very, very good” because “it gives a dimension, it gives depth to the dancers, because there’s no set. In fact, it’s just a video projector, and so it gives a much, much greater depth to the stage, the fact that they’re just on stage and there’s no set.”
During the performance, trilingual emcees give regular explanations between each scene to help the audience situate themselves in the story, and provide cultural explanations and background on Shen Yun, the New York-based company.
“I also thought it was great to have the explanation in both French and English, with the little Chinese words that went into it, so that I could really appreciate” the scenes, Ms. Gratias said.
“I found it respectful that you could see the conductor and even the musicians, because they’re often in the pit and forgotten,” she said.
“Frankly, I liked the humor. It was also good that it wasn’t all technique, but that there was also this little refreshing touch,” she said.
As for the culture presented on stage, the 5,000-year-old authentic Chinese culture, the dance school director found that “it allows the whole world to know a little about their culture, their way of being.”
She also noted that Shen Yun takes us on a journey mainly to ancient China, from dynasty to dynasty, but also a little to modern China.
“We have both an old and a new culture. I really liked that. Even when they were in full bombers and jeans gear, with the bad boys, I thought it was great that there was more than just the silk dress, and that there was also a bit of a West Side Story feel. I thought it was nice.
To finish her inventory of all the different aspects of Shen Yun’s performance, Mrs. Gratias spoke of the link with the divine, present in everything presented by the company whose name means “the beauty of divine beings dancing.”
“There are little phrases that appealed to me,” she said, such as: “The more inner peace you have, the more strength emanates from you.”
“I really liked these little phrases that are thrown in a little bit by the dropper and to be taken for whoever wants to, whoever wants to hear,” she said. She added with a laugh, “I said to myself, this is for me.”
