Photographer and Fengshui Artist Thrilled With Shen Yun

SAN FRANCISCO—Shen Yun Performing Arts brought classical Chinese dance to the San Francisco War Memorial Opera House on Saturday, Jan. 7. Sasha Lee was thrilled to finally see the show after having wanted to attend for the past three years.

Ms. Lee is a photographer and a Fengshui specialist who does architectural arrangements based on Fengshui. She designed the layout of HSBC Bank, for example. Her daughter, Zoe Blank, an Environmental Studies and Economics student at Mills College, was with her at the performance.

“This is my first time experiencing this performance, and I’ve been meaning to come for the last three years,” Ms. Lee said, “and I’m just thrilled to finally get a chance to experience it. I was especially moved by the piece about the Falun Gong, the piece that actually portrayed people in modern costume … I was very moved by that piece.”

In the show a dance titled The Choice tells of a young man in China who becomes a policeman at the same time a young woman, his friend, becomes a Falun Dafa practitioner. When the police are ordered to beat the practitioners, he makes the decision to protect his friend and the other practitioners, according to the program book.

Ms. Lee continued, “Because that’s what’s happening in China right now, and it’s something that a lot of people try to hush and cover up, and I felt using the power of Chinese performance and culture to express it in this form was very, very powerful.”

She thought that the piece demonstrates how suppression by the Chinese government divides people: “The person that you trusted could be the person who’s going to be hurting you. So how this thing can really … create a problem that can separate the culture and the country.”

“Just experiencing that particular piece was very different from all the other pieces because the other ones are beautiful—depictions of beautiful past China—but that [one] really showed what’s happening now. Ultimately at the end, after being here for two hours, the meaning of that piece is, I think, what we’re going to be going back home with.”

Zoe agreed: “I totally resonated with that piece in particular, the modern one, because [of] the Occupy Movement nowadays here.” She said that police brutality has the potential to tear a nation apart. “So I thought that was one of my favorite pieces. It really hit home.”

Reporting by Alex Ma and Diana Mathias

Shen Yun’s New York Company will perform in San Francisco until Jan. 8, and then Los Angeles, Jan. 11 to 14. For more information, visit ShenYunPerformingArts.org