STRASBOURG, France—When André Rinner experienced Shen Yun at the Zénith in Strasbourg on Tuesday, Jan. 21, he said he discovered something “very, very impressive.
“A lot of great dances, very athletic, and really well directed with the 3D backdrop,” said Mr. Rinner, a business leader. “The very, very athletic and very, very physical performance by the dancers is very impressive. This choreography, very, very spectacular. It feels like we’re dancing, we’re flying!”
Mr. Rinner was familiar with the 5,000-year-old traditional Chinese culture, which New York-based Shen Yun has taken as its mission to revive.
“This culture of karma, this culture of Chinese meditation is very symbolic of this ancient China,” he said, referring to the themes present in story-based dances of good being rewarded and evil punished, of divine retribution, and harmony between heaven, earth, and humankind.
For the company director, Shen Yun encapsulates “the virtues of Chinese wisdom, of this population that is very, very wise and very, very respectful of physics and beliefs.”
When Michel Perry came to Shen Yun on Tuesday evening, he had in mind “something quite extraordinary.”
“I wasn’t disappointed,” said Mr. Perry, a former development strategy consultant for major corporations, after seeing the performance.
Mr. Perry was astonished by the harmony of the dancers’ movements, “in total harmony with the music and the movement.”
This harmony was also found in the colors and costumes, he added, taking the example of a dance in which female dancers wore long, flowing “water sleeves”.
“The floating garments completely accompany the story in a way, from that point of view. I thought it was also very, very carefully balanced,” he said.
During the various dancing and singing performances, the former development consultant was able to experience a number of “emotions that were portrayed”, adding that “it was quite easy to get into these emotions.”
Shen Yun means “the beauty of divine beings dancing,” and the show pays tribute to this ancestral belief in a culture inherited from the divine.
“I really liked this aspect of connection to divinity,“ Mr. Perry added. ”It’s actually something that wasn’t completely obvious from the outset, but which, in the commentaries as well as in some of the texts that were projected, was very much at the forefront for me.”
“This quest for light It wasn’t said like that, but I think you can also feel it in a pleasant way,” said the 70-year-old.
In addition to China’s ancient culture and history, Shen Yun exposes the reality of contemporary communist China, denouncing the persecution suffered by practitioners of the Falun Dafa meditation discipline by the Chinese Communist Party.
Falun Dafa, also known as Falun Gong, is a spiritual practice that teaches the three principles of truth, compassion, and tolerance, and five meditative exercises.
“There’s also a kind of struggle for truth here, a determination to show or make others perceive, or at any rate evoke, that there are political regimes that don’t accept different spiritual beliefs,” said Mr.Perry.
Mr. Perry said recommends experiencing Shen Yun for yourself. “It’s a very complete show, since there’s dance, movement, history ... and as long as people are interested, there’s thought!”
