SHEN YUN PERFORMING ARTS REVIEWS

Shen Yun ‘More Than Meets the Eye,’ Says Business Owner

Apr 09, 2025

4/9/2025Updated: 4/9/2025

VANCOUVER, British Columbia—Business owner Edna Tunney had originally planned to see Shen Yun Performing Arts in 2020, but then the pandemic hit, and she left Arizona to go home to Canada and had to part with her tickets.

“But I knew that I would see them at their performance again,” said Ms. Tunney, who had that opportunity not long after, and on April 9 at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre attended again to share the experience with her consultant Stuart Forrest, entrepreneur, who had been visiting Canada to consult for Ms. Tunney’s business.

“I just love them. I love music. I love the dance, colors, all of that. It’s just, it’s so heartwarming. And the stories, the vividness of how they share and express the stories of the different events,” Ms. Tunney said.

“There’s more than meets the eye here. It’s almost multi-leveled and multi-dimensional,” she said.

New York-based Shen Yun is the world’s premier classical Chinese dance company. Through music and dance, Shen Yun’s mission is to revive 5,000 years of Chinese civilization and show audiences the beauty of China before communism.

Mr. Forrest lauded the precision, artistry, and technique of the performance, and Ms. Tunney added that the production had been much more than the sum of its parts.

“It’s going, ‘wow’—I was getting these energetic hits. I’m just fascinated, glued, just anticipating, and I’m with the flow, I can just feel their movements, they’re so graceful and the colors and the chiffons, I just love it,” she said.

“There’s a number of elements that convey that for me. It’s the music. I love music. It’s the color. It’s the flow of the movement. It’s all of that. And what I find so fascinating about this performance is that there’s this other element of another dimension,” she explained.

“It’s almost magical, about going over this wall, and it’s like you’re transported into another dimension. And I don’t know how this is done, but it’s quite phenomenal in terms of going into this other space, this other level of expression, and there’s more that happens. I want to say so much more than one actually sees,” she said.

This was in part conveyed with Shen Yun’s use of patented digital projection technology, allowing the stage to expand infinitely with the use of the digital backdrop.

Mr. Forrest added that the music of a live orchestra also contributed to this immersion and transportive experience.

“You’ve got a live orchestra sitting there,” he said. “The beauty of that, I love going to the orchestra, going to symphonies, and things like that. And so there’s nothing like live music when you can get it done. But for them to be on cue, with the dancers and the choreography and the timing that’s necessary along with the video portion of this thing, and it’s bang!—and that’s fabulous to watch happen and enjoy it as a participant in the audience. To hear it all, see it all, they tied a bow running up pretty nicely.”

Reporting by Ryan Moffat 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.