“It’s beautiful, so beautiful,” Ms. Michael said. “[The] costumes are amazing. I was crying in the beginning, it was just so moving. It’s absolutely gorgeous—it really touched my heart.”

Based in New York, Shen Yun was founded in 2006 and is the world’s premier classical Chinese dance and music company. Now with eight equally-sized companies touring the world simultaneously, Shen Yun’s mission is to revive traditional Chinese culture, which is deeply rooted in spiritual teachings.

The singers said the spirituality of Chinese culture presented is the reason why they wanted to see Shen Yun.

“You can really see it in all the dancers, just the look on their face, you can really feel the spirituality,” Ms. Piner said. “The spirituality is beautiful. It’s not like you see that every day. So that was the main reason we came—because the art of spirituality is absolutely beautiful. We’re enjoying it so much.”

“Every scene … that we see is so beautiful,” Ms. Piner added. “You feel the deep spirituality, and it’s something we really need to see because we don’t see it really anywhere [else]. It’s very rare, so this is a really special show.”

Shen Yun’s program includes story-based dances, some of which are based in modern-day China and depict the Chinese Communist Party’s persecution of followers of Falun Dafa, a spiritual practice that teaches the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance.

According to Shen Yun’s website and program book, all of Shen Yun’s performers practice Falun Dafa, and “they believe that cultivating the heart is the way to create art that is beautifully sublime.”

Ms. Piner said that she could feel the performers’ purity.

Reporting by Xinxin Teng and Wandi Zhu.

The Epoch Times is a proud sponsor of Shen Yun Performing Arts. We have covered audience reactions since Shen Yun’s inception in 2006.