MIAMI—Seeing Shen Yun Performing Arts bring to life 5,000 years of Chinese civilization, Wayne and Marlena Talamas felt it was not just China that needed this once nearly-lost culture revived.
“I love all the history and the cultural part,” said Mr. Talamas, president of a health company. “Beautiful.”
“I think it’s so important. I think that the West needs the culture of China to come to the West,” said Mrs. Talamas after seeing
Shen Yun at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts in Miami on the afternoon of Jan. 11.
Mrs. Talamas was not speaking of the culture of China today but the divinely inspired,
traditional culture of ancient China that New York-based Shen Yun had just shown the audience.
Shen Yun is the world’s premier classical Chinese dance company, with a mission to share with audiences China before communism.
Once known as the “land of the Divine,” China was a
spiritual land, its society centered around the concept of harmony between heaven, earth, and humankind.
This traditional culture felt universal and relevant to the Talamases.
“We need to get some of that tradition here because we’re losing all our traditions in the West because of modernism,” Mrs. Talamas said. “The modern society is killing all that is good in all the cultures of the world. So I think that it’s so important that the Chinese culture, that’s so
ancient, can have more impact on the Western society. I think it was a beautiful message.”
Mr. Talamas said the
music had been incredible, and while much of it was distinctly Chinese, he couldn’t help but be reminded of the vast and expansive Westerns he had grown up with. In addition to classical Chinese dance and story-based dances, Shen Yun’s programs feature some of China’s 50-plus ethnic minority groups, such as a men’s
Tibetan dance set in the snowcapped Himalayas.
Mr. Talamas felt that China could only have the renaissance that Shen Yun presented if it rooted out the evil, such as the Chinese
communist regime’s organ harvesting of prisoners of conscience and other crimes against humanity.
“I’m Catholic, and I know that the Catholics in China are very persecuted also, along with all traditional Chinese philosophy and culture, and I think that it’s very important that we don’t lose our resistance,” he said. “We can learn from the Chinese how to be strong, how not to give up, because the persecution has been more extreme in China than anywhere.”
“It’s an incredible witness to us,” he said.
Reporting by Frank Liang and Catherine Yang.
