SHEN YUN PERFORMING ARTS REVIEWS

Shen Yun Dancers Move Like ‘Magic,’ Says Award-Winning Acrobat

Jan 11, 2025

MIAMI—Mariya Margiyeva and Claudine Choquette are well versed in acrobatics, so watching Shen Yun Performing Arts and learning about classical Chinese dance—where arts like acrobatics and gymnastics originated—was an exciting experience for the two women.

Ms. Margiyeva is an award-winning acrobat and aerialist, and Ms. Choquette is a banker who also has a dance background and founded a nonprofit dance school called Miami Circus.

“I have a very strong passion for dance. So for me, looking at this is incredible,” said Ms. Choquette after seeing Shen Yun at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts on the afternoon of Jan. 11.

“We loved it, it was just amazing,” she said. “The quality also of the performing artists was just incredible.”

New York-based Shen Yun is the world’s premier classical Chinese dance company, known for revitalizing the millennia-old art form. Developed over thousands of years, classical Chinese dance has graced imperial courts and opera stages and is a complete and comprehensive dance system with its own set of unique postures, forms, and movements. With a focus on inner bearing, the famously expressive dance form is well suited to storytelling. It is also a dynamic art form that requires mastery of tumbling techniques—flips, leaps, and spins—which many audience members learn during the performance is where forms like acrobatics and gymnastics originated.

“Spectacular,” Ms. Choquette said, adding special praise for the costumes and choreography. She described the long flowing sleeves female dancers wore in one dance and how they used their costumes as props, propelling the silks into the air and expertly manipulating them as they floated.

“I know it’s hard—it looks so easy. Everything and all those things are spectacular,” Ms. Margiyeva agreed. “Excellent conditions and perfect. Very, very high level.”

Ms. Choquette said she had watched their unique dance movements, tracking how they move, and Ms. Margiyeva said it was as if it was “magic, magic!”

“It’s like high level of everything: musicality, technique, artistic expression,” she said.

Through music and dance, Shen Yun aims to revive 5,000 years of divinely inspired Chinese civilization, and Ms. Margiyeva and Ms. Choquette thought they did so beautifully.

“It’s very bright,” said Ms. Margiyeva. “Like all the messages: you need to believe, you need to have faith ... You need to have faith in the good things, yes.”

“We'll come definitely next year,” Ms. Choquette said.

Reporting by Xinxin Teng and Catherine Yang.

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