WASHINGTON, D.C—Bianca Gracia, executive director of Latinos for America First, felt there was a powerful message within Shen Yun Performing Arts that one could miss if they only believed they were witnessing a performance of beautiful music and dance.

“It’s very powerful,” Ms. Garcia said on March 2, after seeing Shen Yun’s last performance in Washington at the Kennedy Center this year.

“There is something else going on here. There’s a message, a strong message, is being portrayed through this play. But if you don’t know what to look for, you’re just thinking you’re in the arts and you’re seeing people dance and sing and play an instrument.”

“The show was amazing,” Ms. Gracia said. “It was a good historical lesson of the Chinese and their traditions and their belief, their faith system.”

It was important to keep in mind the division between pre-communist China and China under communist rule, according to Ms. Gracia, and understand that the communist regime is an atheist one.

She described one story where a character was “grounded in his faith, so they were upset about that and they wanted him to denounce his faith.” For this, he suffers terribly, but then there is a moment of divine intervention.

“It was like a miracle and wonder,” Ms. Gracia said. “It parallels a lot to what we in Christianity know.”

“I was like, oh, wait a minute here,” she said. “There’s something more to the story here. The story is powerful. It’s very powerful.”