Shen Yun: A Critical Review of the Divine Art of Dance - Essay Sample

Introduction

Shen Yen is a Chinese dance that is referred to like the beauty of divine beings based on the expected experiences of the audience. Shen means a divine being and is used to represent the spiritual traditions of the Chinese nation like the Taoist and Buddha immortals. Shen Yun, as an art, is believed to be the link between heaven and earth, and it has taken up the world by storm with performances in major cities across ye globe. This paper performs a critical review of the Shen Yun concert, the instruments involved, and the fundamentals of its music.

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The Shen Yun dances Chunlin Gu was epic and involved traditional Chinese instruments such as the pipa, guzheng, dizi, and the suona. The primary mission of the Shen Yun dance is to revive the Chinese culture by integrating customary Chinese instruments with the Western music symphony (Mitzen, 2013). Several groups that perform solo or in concerts, but the Shen Yun symphony has stood out because; the erhu and the pipa are unique that no other traditional musical instrument has been able to serve as a replacement. As such, it has been challenging to combine Chinese conventional instruments with those used in the orchestra, but the Shen Yun dance has successfully achieved the task (Gagne & Geng, 2019).

Shen Yun is a unique orchestra as it holds special instruments that have been able to link up well with the pipa and the erhu instruments. It keeps unparalleled tone because the combination of the instruments prevents the notes from overlapping in the same frequency that has been known to raise volumes to high levels leading to unbalanced melodies (Gagne & Geng, 2019). Shen Yun's symphony orchestra overlooks several traditional Chinese instruments because they have a superior replacement among Western musical instruments. An example is the xiao and the bamboo flute that has readily been replaced by the piccolo and the flute in most concerts. The trumpet has been used in the recent past instead of the suona that does not provide ease of play.

In an orchestral concert arrangement, instruments that are plucked like the pipa are not preferred for use in a regular symphony (Gagne & Geng, 2019). The guitar used is similar, while the erhu that is commonly referred to as the two-string violin even though it has a varying tone from the violin produces a unique tone when used accompanied by stringed instruments. Erhu has stood out because it can play concerto, ensemble, and duet as well as solo. When used in Shen Yun concert, the pipa, erhu, and other Chinese traditional instruments like the gu, muyu, Luo and the qing not only blends and complements the Western symphony music but also introduces the rich Chinese culture to the whole concert experience (Gagne & Geng, 2019). The result is a melody that is more inspiring, more vibrant, and more powerful to the audience.

The permanent combination of the eastern musical instruments and the classical western ones has created memorable experiences for the players and the audience. A blend of the Western orchestras and the traditional eastern melodies has enabled all the original compositions of the Shen Yun to receive praise from several award-winning musicians across the globe (Gagne & Geng, 2019). The Shen Yun singers use the bel canto technique that makes them stand out in the way the rhythms and the harmony of the music are presented.

The Shen Yun concert has a primary goal of showcasing the Chinese traditional culture to the world by ensuring that the audience experiences a divine culture during the show. I can state that the live orchestra by Chunlin Gu lived up to its promise. The performance took us to great eras of Chinese history while capturing several periods of the recent past of the Chinese people. The stage presented ancient stories and folk traditions that I found to be entertaining, inspiring, and enriching.

The night was thrilling, with performances from around sixty artists that are mostly dancers, musicians, and singers (Wong, 2016). A pair of emcees was on stage to take us through every performance that helped in understanding several Chinese dialects and the reasons behind the outstanding and unique performances. The dance styles are somehow acrobatic that borrow moves from several classical Chinese dances.

The Chinese gymnastics that were very common over four decades ago were showcased in the concert whose intention is to preserve the Chinese cultural practices and tradition that has existed for the past five thousand years. There have been claims that the communist party is destroying the culture, and that is why the Chun Yen concert is banned in China (Gagne & Geng, 2019). Shen Yun's performance captures three elements of classical Chinese music that include the bearing, the form, and technical skill. The bearing is concerned with the emotions, the ethnic flavor, and the cultural experience promoted by the dance. At the same time, the form covers the posture and the expressive movements of the performing artists. The technical skill presents the physical techniques such as jumping, flipping, and leaping that is shared among the Chinese artists.

References

Gagne, T. & Geng, Z. (2019). Chinese gods, heroes, and mythology. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Abdo Publishing.

Metzen, J. (2013). Power in concert: the nineteenth-century origins of global governance. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. doi: 10.1017/S1537592715003473

Wong, Y. (2016). Contemporary directions in Asian American dance. Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press. doi: 10.1017/S0040557417000345