WASHINGTON—Media mogul Armstrong Williams was something “very inspirational and aspirational” in Shen Yun Performing Arts.
“Anyone that doesn’t get a chance to see this show would have lost out on some great art of performance,” said Mr. Williams, author, nationally syndicated commentator, broadcast company owner, and co-owner of the Baltimore Sun. He and friends Jan Adams and Marcus Moore enjoyed Shen Yun at the Kennedy Center Opera House in Washington on Feb. 21.
He praised the dance and “the cinematography, the staging where everything looks so real as if people were coming out of the sky when the girls were flying.”
“It was just fantastic. The best choreography that you ever want. I mean, the grace with which they move. You can obviously tell they have been performing together for a very long time,” he said.
“It was just really good. It’s really an old dynasty culture that we witnessed tonight. Particularly when you had all the men dancing together and the women dancing together,” he said. “And just the grace and the peace, there’s just a solitude about that movement. It was just really great. I thoroughly enjoyed it.”
One strong theme he saw in the performance was that of rising again, like the phoenix from the ashes.
“We will continue to rise, no matter what tries to hold us down, no matter what conflict, we will find a way to rise out of the ashes, [like the] phoenix,” he said. “We always rise above our conflict, rise above whatever our differences are, and we find a way to find unity in the end. That we have more in common than we have that separates us.”
“When you think about why this all came about out of conflict and how they used this conflict, their power, to show that they will always be strong, they will always be courage among them, that nothing can ever hold them back. And so they just had to find another way to express themselves, and so they expressed themselves through the art,” Mr. Williams said.
