SHEN YUN PERFORMING ARTS REVIEWS

Shen Yun a Beautiful Display of Courage, Says Couple

Apr 21, 2023

ROSEMONT, Ill.—The Egals had long wanted to see Shen Yun Performing Arts, and it was every bit as beautiful as they could have hoped for when they finally saw it at the Rosemont Theater on April 20.

“It’s just unbelievable,” said Mr. Jerry Egal, a pilot. “We love it. It’s very beautiful, very colorful, beautiful dancing, just exquisite dancing.”

Mrs. Egal agreed, and added that it was “deeply touching.”

New York-based Shen Yun is the world’s premier classical Chinese dance company and takes as its mission to revive 5,000 years of Chinese civilization. In recent years, the company has added to that the description of “China before communism.” Indeed, for five millennia, China was known as the “Land of the Divine,” and its people believed the culture a gift from the heavens. The Chinese Communist Party that rose to power in 1949 has for 70 years sought to uproot traditional culture.

With Shen Yun’s dance and music presentation of China’s ancient culture, Mrs. Egals keenly felt what China had really lost under communism.

“It’s heartbreaking just to know it,” she said. “I think that this [Shen Yun] is a wonderful way to get the word out.”

“This is a lovely, lovely way to not only share Chinese culture, traditional Chinese culture, but to tell them the truth. And what a loss it would be to the world if Chinese culture disappeared—if it was no more. That would just be a terrible loss for the rest of the world,” she said.

“I feel for them,” Mr. Egals said. “They hopefully will overcome this scourge of communism that’s ruling over them now. That’s all we can pray for. I think in the end, communism always does fail.”

The couple said that though the situation was tragic, Shen Yun inspired hope.

“The Chinese Communist government doesn’t want anything to be more meaningful in the people’s hearts than them. They want to be the be-all and end-all of the reality in this world. But they’re not. They can’t destroy the spiritual divine. They may destroy the bodies of people, but they will never destroy the spirits of the people. And I think it’s extremely inspirational,” Mrs. Egals said.

“And I think that people in our country could learn so much from this. Because the one thing that I think our people in this country need to show more of is courage. Courage. And I just think this is just a very beautiful experience.”

Mr. Egals agreed, saying the “spiritual divine is what keeps the people going,” and he could see that in Shen Yun.

“It’s what’s within them. And the expression of that is coming out in the dance. It’s very beautiful, you know, the three tenets—compassion, tolerance, and truth. And by living for those tenets, you can’t go wrong,“ he said. ”I’m kind of moved by the performance. It really is quite telling.”

Reporting by Stacey Tang.

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