Three and a half months before Shen Yun Performing Arts is set to grace the stage of the Leipzig Opera again, tickets are already sold out.
Leipzig, Germany—once home to Johann Sebastian Bach, Felix Mendelssohn, and briefly Friedrich Schiller as he wrote his famous poem “Ode to Joy”—remains home to major cultural institutions such as the Leipzig Opera, where Shen Yun performed for the very first time just last year.
In March 2025, Shen Yun will perform in the city for the second time.
New York-based Shen Yun is the world’s premier classical Chinese dance company, with a mission to revive 5,000 years of Chinese civilization.
Since its inception in 2006, it has grown to have eight equal-sized troupes that tour the world simultaneously every year between December and May, each performing nearly 100 shows.
Leipzig audiences expressed awe and gratitude at Shen Yun’s debut in 2024 during interviews with NTD, The Epoch Times’ sister media outlet.
Heidrun Müller, the former chief of protocol in the state of Saxony, said the show was “wonderfully beautiful.”
“Very, very harmonious, very charming,” she said. “Paired with this artistry, [the dancers] are so light and move so easily across the stage.
“And in the choreography, nobody stands out individually, but everyone is synchronized, and everything is just right.”
“I have seen many performances, but never anything so fascinating. That was a real enrichment,” he said.
Heike Hansen von Hardenberg, an art restorer, and Dr. Jens Bartram said they had traveled hundreds of miles from Kiel to see the performance in Leipzig.
“The trip was worth it,” said Ms. von Hardenberg. “It was exactly as I expected. All the colors, dancing, and music were beautiful.”
Shen Yun is renowned not only for reviving classical Chinese dance—a nearly lost art form dating back thousands of years—but also for pioneering music combining classical Western and ancient Chinese music traditions. Each year, new compositions are created for the performances and performed live by Shen Yun’s orchestras.
Shen Yun’s performances often feature solo virtuosos, including bel canto singers.
Manuela Bernhardt, a singer and a music school director, praised Shen Yun’s revival of the beautiful singing style.
“The voices are great, really great. They sang [clearly] and were very emotionally touching—we liked that a lot,” she said.
“We are still very enchanted and still very inspired from the many beautiful impressions, from the bright colors to the great music and the really excellent performances of the artists.”
Several audience members described the experience as “perfect.”
Others, like Binh Le, a film director, had an emotional experience.
“Everything from the beginning to the end makes my heart so full of emotion,” he said. “It brings forward a lot of feelings and makes my heart beat faster.”
Many audience members attributed the inspirational nature of their experience to the universal values they saw in Shen Yun’s art.
“Standing up for each other, being there for each other, reliability, loyalty,” said Tommy Borchers, a digitization specialist at Telekom MMS. “It’s really good that [these values] are shown and that they are remembered and maintained, that you live for them, so that the tradition doesn’t die out.”
