SEARCH
WASHINGTON—The Shen Yun Performing Arts gave a special performance to an invitation-only audience on Tuesday evening at the Kennedy Center. Many of the guests had received their invitations from the Tom Lantos Human Rights Foundation. The music and dance presentations drew enthusiastic applause.
After 27 years as a Foreign Service officer, Richard Livingston is now semi-retired and with the State Department. He was struck by the emotions that he felt while watching the Shen Yun show: “It was spectacular. It really was wonderful.”
“You could feel your emotions going up and down, particularly when the woman was beaten in jail. It was the compassion that she showed [for the prison guards]. I thought that was the message of the show,” Mr. Livingston said. He was referring to the dance Dignity and Compassion, which depicts the persecution of a Falun Gong practitioner and is representative of the persecution underway against Falun Gong in present-day China.
Mr. Livingston recalled the book The Diary of Anne Frank, a story of a young Jewish girl who recounts in her diary her experience of spending 25 months in a warehouse in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam during the Holocaust.
“The message there too, from the girl writing the diary, was that despite all of the horrible things that are happening around them, she still has hope that something good will come out of it,” Mr. Livingston said. “And this was the message of Congressman Tom Lantos.”
I did work with him [Rep. Lantos] indirectly. I was the senior advisor from the State Department to the Helsinki Commission. Congressman Tom Lantos was very active in human rights, and he was always in the forefront of human rights issues,” he said.
Mr. Lantos was the only holocaust survivor to serve in Congress and was the founder of the House Human Rights Caucus.
In addition to the messages in the show, Mr. Livingston expressed his appreciation for many of the show’s other aspects: “Wonderful choreography, very moving, wonderful singers, and just extraordinary dancers, and just can’t say anything other than the word ‘extraordinary’ to describe the dancers,” he said.
‘Breathtaking’
Mr. Lewis, manager of Diversity Initiatives and Community Relations at Safeway, also recognized and appreciated the high-caliber dance, choreography, and overall beauty of the performance.
He was especially attracted to the “beauty,” “symmetry,” and “synchronization” of the dancers: “When you can see 20 to 30 people dancing, and their hands are moving the same way, even their garments are moving in the same way, that takes a lot of practice. … It’s the techniques and the skills that you can’t find anywhere else.”
Speaking of the costumes, Mr. Lewis said, “They are breathtaking.” This is the third Shen Yun show he has seen.
A six show run will be held at Washington D.C.'s Kennedy Center Opera House from August 26 to 30.
The Epoch Times is a proud sponsor of the Shen Yun Performing Arts 2009 World Tour. For more information please visit ShenYunPerformingArts.org .
