SHEN YUN PERFORMING ARTS REVIEWS

Nonprofit President Sees Hope for Future and Change in Shen Yun

Jan 30, 2025

SACRAMENTO—The Newmans had wanted to see Shen Yun Performing Arts for a long time, and upon attending on Jan. 29, they felt the artists lived up to their name.

“I’ve been wanting to see this for a long time,” said Brent Newman, now retired and consulting. He and his wife, Vicki, president of a nonprofit, saw the performance at the SAFE Credit Union Performing Arts Center. “And it’s absolutely beautiful. It’s moving.”

Based in New York, Shen Yun is the world’s premier classical Chinese dance company, and its mission is to revive 5,000 years of Chinese civilization—China before communism. For millennia, the Chinese believed their culture divinely inspired, and Shen Yun’s name references that belief, translating as “the beauty of divine beings dancing.”

“I love it. The dancing is very spiritual to me, very spiritual. Yes, I love just the movement, and it’s communicating to me within the movement and the music itself,” said Mrs. Newman.

Only halfway through the performance, the Newmans said they were already blown away by the excellence of the artists and the production at large by intermission.

“I see the pain. I see the joy. I see just the hope that maybe something can happen in the future,” said Mrs. Newman.

It wasn’t lost on the Newmans that Shen Yun cannot perform in China, where the communist regime has sought to destroy traditional culture over its 75-year rule. In addition to Shen Yun’s mission to revive traditional Chinese culture, its program often includes story-based dances set in modern-day China that are based on real events.

Mrs. Newman was moved by one such piece, which depicted the Chinese communist regime’s persecution of practitioners of Falun Gong, a peaceful spiritual practice. Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, teaches the three principles of truth, compassion, and tolerance. After reaching immense popularity in the 1990s, the regime banned it outright in 1999, and the dance told the story of a Falun Gong practitioner who holds on to faith despite persecution.

“I think that part, and then that there is hope in heaven, that was probably the most moving to me,” said Mrs. Newman.

Mr. Newman felt Shen Yun showed the beauty of freedom in contrast to the ugliness of the regime’s oppression.

“It seems that the Chinese people, this is the heart of the people, and it’s suppressed by the regime,” he said. “Yet, you know, for a billion people, their hearts want to cry out for freedom and hope and joy and the beauty. The beauty of this is, and the oppression is the opposite of that; it’s despair and ugly, and it lacks the freedom and the movement that this portrays.”

Mr. Newman expressed his admiration for the artists, and the dedication it must have taken to reach their level of excellence, noting the seamlessness with which the dance, music, and unique animated backdrop worked together.

“That’s very, very difficult. And they’ve had to spend so many hours working on every small piece of that to make it look so elegant and easy to us, and it moves me when I see someone that’s so dedicated to their profession in order to create the kind of sentiment that we’re getting,” he said. “And so I respect them. I honor them for their profession.”

Mrs. Newman agreed. “The excellence is just coming through,” she said. “ And again, the music, it speaks to my heart.”

Reporting by Lily Yu and Catherine Yang.

The Epoch Times is a proud sponsor of Shen Yun Performing Arts. We have covered audience reactions since Shen Yun’s inception in 2006.