LOS ANGELES—The Dorothy Chandler Pavilion opened its curtains to a sold-out venue on Jan. 26, as Shen Yun Performing Arts Touring Company graced the stage for a matinee performance.
Joan Wismer, founder of the Joan M. Wismer Foundation, was captivated by the performance.
“The show is fantastic,” she said. “It’s absolutely beautiful.”
A Shen Yun show primarily consists of short pieces of classical Chinese dance, supported by a live orchestra and an animated digital backdrop. Interspersed throughout the dance pieces are operatic soloists, who sing in Chinese.
“The costuming, the dancing, [and] the soloist is incredible,” she said, noting that she appreciated the English translation of the singers’ lyrics.
Ms. Wismer recalled that she saw a Shen Yun advertisement on television and said, “This is a place we have to go.”
New York-based Shen Yun began in 2006 with one dance company and has grown to three companies that will travel to 100 cities this season. Its mission is to revive China’s 5,000-year-old divinely inspired culture through the performing arts, according to the company website.
One of the vocalist’s gowns particularly caught Ms. Wismer’s eye: “I said to my friend, ‘I wish I could borrow her purple formal.'”
Ms. Wismer said she could feel much effort was expended to create the performance.
“It’s an honor to be here and to know there was a tremendous amount of research done, I’m sure, to put the whole show together,” she said.
‘Absolute beauty and feminine grace’
Susan Madsen was also among the audience in the sold out performance.
She said that she loved it: “It was over way too soon.”
Sharing her experience, Mrs. Madsen said, “It was gorgeous, the costumes, the dancing, the emotions, and the messages were beautiful, just beautiful.”
What made a strong impression on Mrs. Madsen was the opening dance, Descending to the World, which she said was “very spiritual and captivating.” Also, the dance The Phoenix Fairies, where the dancers “were so graceful and childlike, into absolute beauty and feminine grace.”
Mrs. Madsen also felt that the “spiritual messages that were behind it were fantastic, and it unites the majority of us together, we all can relate to that.”
Upon seeing the dance Divine Mercy, she said it reminded her to “have more compassion and more awareness of what is going on in China and it brought back a lot of memories of what we saw in the news years ago and that is very touching.”
Shen Yun also incorporates digitally mastered backdrops that are seamlessly timed with the dancers and give one a feeling of heaven and earth being one.
“I thought that it was quite fascinating how it would go into the animation and then how the real characters would come up, just perfect timing and how it would change from one to the other; that was quite captivating,” said Mrs. Madsen.
Shen Yun’s team of costume artists pays meticulous attention to details when sewing the colorful costumes that bring life to the story and vividness to the entire production. And the use of flowing fabric enables the dancer to appear to be a heavenly maiden or a delicate butterfly.
“Everything about it—it’s hard to say any one thing, it was so beautiful,” she said of the costumes and the show.
Mrs. Madsen summarized the evening’s performance as “miraculous and glorious, just glorious.”
Reporting by Chang Yi Yuan and Maria Banks.
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
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