SHEN YUN PERFORMING ARTS REVIEWS

Principal Sees Important Virtues in Shen Yun

Apr 15, 2024

EDMONTON, Canada—Kenneth Noster, a school principal, and his wife Marlane Noster, a principal’s assistant, attended Shen Yun Performing Arts at the Northern Alberta Jubilee Auditorium on April 14.

Shen Yun’s performers believe that “cultivating the heart is the way to create art that is beautifully sublime,” explains the classical Chinese dance company in its program book and on its website. Indeed Mr. Noster said he was able to see virtue and goodness throughout the performance.

“It was beautiful, absolutely gorgeous. I love the fact that, number one, that the cast are all striving for personal virtue, so that that actually exudes through their performance as well, because the performances are really all about virtue and goodness,” he said.

“To know that the performers themselves are striving for that personally, it shines through. They’re able to perform in a way that they couldn’t if it was just surface.”

He noted that values like kindness, honesty, and purity—”it comes across” in the show.

“They exude that goodness in their performance. You can feel it,” Mrs. Noster said. “They do it physically, and they do it with their joy and their performance.”

“The costumes are modest and pure. The movements are graceful and beautiful,” Mr. Noster added.

Based in New York, Shen Yun was founded in 2006 by a small group of leading Chinese artists and quickly became the world’s premier classical Chinese dance and music company. Now with eight equally sized companies that tour the world simultaneously, Shen Yun is on a mission to revive traditional Chinese culture and the beauty of China before communism.

As an educator, Mr. Noster felt that Shen Yun was very important for children and youth. The performers’ personal discipline “could actually encourage young people to strive for goodness and discipline [and] self-control in themselves,” he said.

Mr. Noster went on to say that he believes the current education system is not adequate for helping young people look beyond themselves, as the values it teaches don’t stem from a higher faith. He pointed out that traditional Chinese culture—which is deeply rooted in the spiritual teachings of Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism, as Shen Yun’s website explains—teaches a goodness that is currently lacking in today’s school system.

“Those very characteristics need to be lived from a spiritual point of view, and most education isn’t nearly spiritual enough,” said Mr. Noster.

“It doesn’t matter which religion a person is with,“ he said. ”The particular faith that’s being proposed here is ancient Chinese, and it’s beautiful and it’s good. It’s got a basic goodness in it. Unfortunately, the school system, our society, has pulled away.”

In his view, “our school system, in fact, encourages young people to look after themselves, and this performance did just the opposite.”

Mr. Noster said the values presented in Shen Yun’s performance, such as truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance, are all crucial to a society.

“The virtues, the qualities of all of these dances, what they each taught was that you go beyond [considering] yourself,” said Mr. Noster.

Mrs. Noster added that the performers presented more than just skill.

“It was very enjoyable. Artistically, they were perfect. They were beautiful, but they had something beyond just artistic ability,” she said, calling it a sense of authenticity.

“It was authentic, and they had a beautiful spirit.”

Reporting by Caifeng Lin and Wandi Zhu.

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