MISSISSAUGA, Canada—Shen Yun Performing Arts left John Enman, president of Juice Concepts, educated and impressed after its opening night performance at Living Arts Centre on Thursday.
“I didn’t expect to see so much when I came tonight. My expectations were not to see something like this. I’d come back and see it again. I want to tell my friends so that they could come and see something like this because it was amazing,” said Mr. Enman.
He was particularly enthusiastic about the tour he got of Chinese history.
“It was fantastic. I felt like I learned so much about the culture and the country. More so than even when I travelled to Taiwan,” he said.
“It was showing the different times, back to 5,000 years ago and the different people, the Tibetans and everything else, it was very nice.”
He said the span of time Shen Yun covered made the night both interesting and fascinating because he had never studied Chinese culture before.
Based in New York, Shen Yun tours the world on a mission to revive 5,000 years of traditional Chiense culture, a heritage all but destroyed after 60 years of communist rule in China, most notably during the decade-long Cultural Revolution.
China was a land steeped in spirituality and reverence for the divine, values antithetical to the communist ideology enforced since 1949.
Mr. Enman said that, although he himself is not very spiritual, he found it interesting to see this point of view.
And he was impressed by the performance overall, he said, particularly by how well-trained the dancers were.
“You could just see that they’ve been training forever. Their muscles in their legs were just amazing to see, how they must perform and how they must work so hard to get to that level,” he said, adding, “I don’t know if people can really understand that because they make it look so easy that it looks simple.”
“And how they were all in sync with each other. The synchronicity of it and everything else—the timing and the costumes and the colour and the vastness of it—it was just gorgeous, it was beautiful, it was an amazing show.”
Mr. Enman highlighted the costumes of two of the dances for special praise: Sleeves of Silk, and Snowflakes Welcoming Spring.
Both dances feature unique elements. In the first, the dancers perform in long flowing water sleeves which accentuate each movement and linger in the air like a visual echo long after the movement is done.
In the second, the dancers twirl silk handkerchiefs which symbolize snowflakes in a final farewell to winter as spring arrives.
“They were gorgeous when they were all timed together, and the snowflakes, when they threw them and caught them … that’s difficult to do a move and then recover and grab it at the same time. So it was amazing to see something like that,” Mr. Enman said.
He also enthused about the orchestra, which has a philharmonic orchestra as its base with traditional Chinese instruments leading the melodies.
“It was just delightful. I love how they’ve got Western and Eastern music put together … It just meshed wonderfully. It fit like it was supposed to be. The music was really good. It really added to it.”
He said the production was beyond expectations.
“I expected to come and see a few dance moves and everything else but this was fast-paced action, non-stop. That’s a lot of energy that they expended tonight. It was quite uplifting to see that.”
“It’s a show that met and exceeded my expectations and I would come back and see it,” Mr. Enman said.
“We come here quite often and I’ve never seen anything like that performance,” he noted.
“If you can see it, see it, because it’s well worth it.”
The Shen Yun International Company will stage four more shows at Mississauga’s Living Arts Centre, finishing on Sunday.
For more information, visit ShenYunPerformingArts.org.
