PARIS—Philippe Candeloro, a successful figure skater, Olympic medalist, vice world champion, and bronze medalist twice over (1994, 1998) was among the audience with his family when Shen Yun Performing Arts New York Company performed to a full house on its second show in Paris, to the delight of more than 3,500 people.
“This is a wonderful show,” enthused the champion. “You see a lot of figures that are similar to figure skating when the dancers do their spins on the floor. One wonders how they do it without ice underfoot!”
The ice is broken at the intermission, and the athlete, recently a finalist in the blockbuster show Dancing with the Stars melts before the performance of the group. “I think there is this harmony between the dancers, they may be forty, fifty or sixty but they are still all together and I’ve never seen anything quite like it in any show so far! Above all, what we see on stage is the amount of work they had to put in and at the same time not to surpass each other’s performances; there is no sense of competition, everyone is in perfect harmony and so light on their feet, never forgetting to smile,” he said.
For him, whose characters on stage most frequently referred back to Medieval Scottish Times, the days of the Musketeers or the Wild West, it was quite a revelation to discover on this occasion a different tradition. “I have not much visited China but this show has taken me on a journey there and I appreciate that. The two Masters of Ceremonies’ presentations really helped us to understand and appreciate what was going on.”
Another lesson from the East besides the importance of regular and diligent work is “the body movements within their technical gestures are so artistic and so smooth that it makes for a perfectly beautiful choreography,” Mr. Candeloro said.
Read the original French article.
Reporting by NTD Television and Aurélien Girard
Shen Yun Performing Arts, based in New York, tours the world on a mission to revive traditional Chinese culture. For more information, visit ShenYunPerformingArts.org
