NEW YORK CITY—Robert McEntee had seen Shen Yun Performing Arts once and was so impressed and supportive of the artists’ mission that he had to come again. This time he was able to attend with his wife, Iris Colon McEntee, who agreed.
“It’s very, very beautiful,” said Mr. McEntee, a magician and performer, to which his wife added that there was also “so much meaning” in the performance. The couple saw Shen Yun at Lincoln Center on April 5.
New York-based Shen Yun is the world’s top classical Chinese dance company. Through
music and
dance, Shen Yun’s mission is to revive 5,000 years of Chinese civilization, showing audiences “China before communism.”
“I think this is what China should be today,” said Mrs. Colon McEntee, who is retired from the medical field. The couple said it was sad that Shen Yun artists and others had been
persecuted by the Chinese communist regime for their faith, and wanted to support Shen Yun’s mission, which they felt was a peaceful and beautiful one.
Mrs. Colon McEntee said the whole performance had been beautiful, and the dancers, in their beautiful outfits and colors, flowed in an amazing way and almost seemed to fly.
An expert in stage effects himself, Mr. McEntee admired the backdrop Shen Yun used that did, in fact, allow characters to fly off into the skies by merging stage and screen.
“It was very nice effects with the people and the backdrops,” Mr. McEntee said. “That was very, very well done.”
To the
performers, he wanted to say “congratulations on all your hard work. And you can tell a lot of discipline and training goes into it.”
Mrs. Colon McEntee felt the performance
conveyed a lot, and creatively.
“The goodness of these people and what they had to endure, what they have to go through back in China, [which] still is communist,” she said. “[The performance] even had
some funny, comical, a little bit, which softened it. And you wanted them to kick the bad guy. It was good. It was funny too.”
“Beautiful. Well done. Beautiful,” she said.
Reporting by Sally Sun and Catherine Yang.
