PITTSBURGH—Music professor Anne Patterson only wished she had experienced Shen Yun Performing Arts sooner.
“It’s really wonderful, and I wish we had done this many years ago,” she said after seeing Shen Yun at The Benedum Center for the Performing Arts on April 27. “This time, we were on vacation, actually, and I heard this, and I said, ‘OK, this time, we’re going.’ So this time, here we are.”
Based in New York, Shen Yun is the world’s premier classical Chinese dance company, with a
mission to revive 5,000 years of Chinese civilization.
Shen Yun’s orchestra is unique in that it permanently combined ancient Chinese instruments into a
classical orchestra, and Ms. Patterson thought it wonderfully done.
“Honestly, I don’t really have words. This is my first experience with this, and I really don’t have words to express how wonderful I think it is, how beautiful it is,” she said.
“It’s just a wonderful thing that they have ... decided to bring this back.”
Ms. Patterson said that when she taught music, she would sometimes have students who came in assuming they were going to hate the material, but music gets through to people, she said, and they would change their minds. She felt the
music in Shen Yun rooted in a culture many might not be familiar with, and similarly convincing.
“Although every culture has its own music and its own families of instruments, music is not exclusive to any one people,” she said.
“It’s such a beautiful blending of cultures to bring these
instruments, which are things that you could actually look at and say, oh, that’s different from our music in this respect, but on the other hand, it’s exactly the same as ours in another way.
“And I really love this, and I so admire
the people who have really put everything on the line to save this culture. I just, I really admire that,” she said.
“It was really wonderful and I am so grateful to have had the opportunity to see this.”
Reporting by NTD and Catherine Yang.
