AUGUSTA, Ga.—Gregory Francisco had always wanted to see Shen Yun Performing Arts, but it never seemed to come to his city until this year. Lauren Francisco gifted her husband with tickets to celebrate his birthday, and Mr. Francisco said he could not have thought of a better gift.

“This was perfect,” he said.

New York-based Shen Yun is the world’s premier classical Chinese dance company and now tours more than 200 cities each year to bring audiences a performance of 5,000 years of Chinese civilization.

Mrs. Francisco said she was taken with the sheer fluidity of the performance, whether it was the creative use of brilliantly colored costumes by the dancers or the flow of the music from one mood to the next, one story to the other. She touched on traditional Chinese concepts of harmony and balance, wherein one seeks strength within softness and stillness in motion.

“Oh, it was phenomenal,” Mrs. Francisco said. “It was mesmerizing ... it was just so perfected.”

“That was phenomenal,” he said, recalling the setting of the snowcapped Himalayas and the vibrant energy of the dancers.

“There was a real spiritual dimension to everything that they did, and you start hearing it and listening to it, and it just—it captures you, more than anything, and it draws you in,” Mr. Francisco said.

Traditional Chinese culture was once known as a divinely inspired culture, and Shen Yun artists say they aim to live by the same traditional values they seek to revive—with reverence for the divine, compassion, integrity, and an emphasis on spiritual self-betterment along with artistic excellence.

“It’s the divine—recognizing that there is a spiritual aspect to everything that we do. And [their] compassion, the genuineness, the authenticity is what I think is so real, and to me, that just takes it to another level,” he said.

Mrs. Francisco agreed, adding that the fluidity she felt throughout the performance she felt within the artists as well—as a sort of inner peace that radiated toward the audience.

“That centers you,” she said.

Mr. Francisco agreed, likening the experience of watching Shen Yun to meditation.

“I’m sitting there, and it creates a cause of meditation, if you will. A calmness, and sereneness, and serenity,” he said. “We get caught up in this fast-paced world, and we forget that sometimes with the divine, with spirituality, we can calm down, we can know ourselves, we can know each other, we can be kind, we can love each other, we can be compassionate to each other.”

Audience member Nehemiah Harvard, a network architect and tech CEO, similarly shared an experience of getting in touch with the divine.

The art, and in particular the music, put Mr. Harvard in touch with this spirituality and the divine, he said, referencing the Creator as the grand architect of all things.

“If you understand the sound from horns, the violins, all of these things create a unison,” he said.

“We’re all one, and the Creator and us are one,” Mr. Harvard said. “The dancing, expression of the body, is a form of praise and a form of the architect of the instrumentation is also what we call divinity.”

“[Shen Yun is] magnificent,” he added. “I love it.”