“I’ve wanted to see Shen Yun for the last—I don’t know how many years, probably eight, ten years I’ve wanted to see Shen Yun,” Mr. Mark said on April 6 at Lincoln Center during intermission of Shen Yun’s opening night performance. He had high praise for the production.

“It’s so beautifully choreographed, and the dancers perform with so much spirit. You really feel a genuine commitment to the work,“ he said. ”It seems very clear to me that there’s a great deal of love and thought that has gone into this material and into this production.”

He felt Shen Yun was “very cinematic,” especially with the use of its patented backdrop set technology.

“I think that the use of the screens is brilliant. Really brilliant. I think the way they’ve used these screens in this thing are very unusual. And they’ve timed it so beautifully where the actors sort of move in and out of the screens perfectly. It’s really, really terrific,” he said.

“It’s like a magic trick, but it’s done quite brilliantly,' he said.

New York-based Shen Yun was formed in 2006, the same year Mr. Mark was in China visiting major sites.

“It’s very interesting to see this sort of philosophical position put into a creative and artistic expression. It’s too bad that that culture, which has existed for 5,000 years, of the Middle Kingdom, is something that is not valued in contemporary China,” he said. “Because I think that the culture of China, going back 5,000 years, is the most remarkable culture in the world.”