“The dancing is beautiful,” Mrs. Donachy said. “Just so elegant and it’s amazing to me how they do it simultaneously together at the same time, and it just looks very graceful.”

“They’re amazing,” Mr. Donachy added.

Once little known in the West, classical Chinese dance is a comprehensive dance form with its own set of postures, poses, and movements, also requiring mastery of difficult tumbling techniques. Audiences often note that the dancing is at once both energetic and calming, perhaps alluding to to classical Chinese dance’s emphasis on inner bearing, letting the character’s inner world drive the movement.

Misty Phillips, a human resources manager, said the emotion conveyed through the performance had been powerful.

Ms. Phillips had had some awareness of Shen Yun, but believed the advertising did not come close to conveying what a Shen Yun experience was really like. By chance, they had booked a hotel in the city and discovered in the middle of the night that Shen Yun performers would be staying at the same hotel. A light bulb went off in her head, and she decided, “We have to go.”

Ms. Phillips noted that Shen Yun had depicted this story with hope and beauty.

“We had tears in our eyes,” she said. “It was like a beautiful way to learn, but also eye-opening to see.”

The inclusion of stories like this is but one reason Shen Yun is banned from performing in China, which saddened Ms. Phillips.

“That’s heartbreaking, because it was so beautiful that their own country limits that,” she said. “I say to them, stay brave, stay strong, and continue in that journey because you are touching people.”

“There’s trials, there’s triumphs, there’s humor. But then, at the end of the day, we’re all people and we’re all working towards the same thing,” she said.