“Absolutely beautiful—everything I could have hoped for,” Mr. Watkins said after seeing Shen Yun at the Belk Theater at Blumenthal Performing Arts Center on April 15. “It was delightful.
Mr. Watkins said one of the most touching moments was a story-based dance that brought the millennia of traditional Chinese culture to the present, showing the Chinese who still hold on to faith and tradition despite oppression by the Chinese communist regime.
Mr. Watkins said he saw in that vignette that they were “fighting for freedom.”
“I’m so glad that I came,” he said, adding that if he had to describe the performance to someone who hadn’t seen it, he would only say: “See it. Go experience it.”
Mr. McKinney said Shen Yun was a “very uplifting” performance that truly touched your heart.
“It’s amazing, fascinating, heartwarming,” he said. “It was very uplifting ... it'll touch you right here.”
Like Mr. Watkins, Mr. McKinney said he saw freedom in the art of Shen Yun, and “that made me feel better to see that on the stage.”
In contrast to the atheist communist regime, the traditional Chinese culture that the regime has tried to destroy over its decades of rule was divinely inspired and very spiritual.
“The same principles of life, and the principles of ethics and humanity being from divine to earth are so similar, so well connected, and take divisions once you get here to earth, and it divides in cultures,” he said.
He said it was a shame to see that once divine culture decline like it has in the modern day, but he saw “hope in this, that cultures can come together and maybe start to incline again for better. It just gave me a good feeling of that.”
