Shen Yun Closes a Season of Acclamation, Medals, and Sold-Out Houses
The classical Chinese dance company's 20th tour drew generals, lawmakers, and sold-out crowds across five continents—often in defiance of Beijing's pressure.
Shen Yun Performing Arts at the Tokyo International Forum on May 13, 2026. (The Epoch Times)
On the afternoon of Thursday, April 16, at Philadelphia's Miller Theater, a Pennsylvania state senator placed Pennsylvania Freedom Medals around the necks of eight Shen Yun performers—four dancers and four musicians—every one of them a direct victim of religious persecution in China, or a family member of one.
"Thank you for being a light in the darkness there," Sen. Doug Mastriano told the artists.
It was, in many ways, the emotional center of Shen Yun's 20th-anniversary season—and one of many honors and proclamations bestowed on the company by lawmakers across its global tour.
The New York-based classical Chinese dance and music company wrapped its 2026 U.S. tour this spring, and across more than a hundred cities in the United States, Latin America, Europe, and East Asia, its eight touring companies pulled in generals, senators, foreign lawmakers, theater veterans, working dancers, musicians, Catholic priests, and Protestant pastors—many of whom walked out describing the experience in the language of tears, light, and the divine.
Founded in 2006 by Chinese artists who escaped the Chinese regime's persecution, Shen Yun performs a brand new program every year built around classical Chinese dance and a live orchestra blending Eastern and Western instruments. The company's stated mission is to revive 5,000 years of Chinese civilization—what it calls "China Before Communism." The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) bars Shen Yun from performing inside China and has continued to pressure venues overseas and lawmakers not to attend. This year, as in all years, audiences turned out anyway, often in record numbers.
A Four-Star General at the Kennedy Center
Charles Flynn, a retired U.S. Army four-star general, enjoyed Shen Yun at the Kennedy Center Opera House in Washington on the afternoon of Jan. 17, 2026. Frank Liang/The Epoch Times
The season's first headline moment came on Jan. 17 at the Trump Kennedy Center Opera House in Washington, where retired U.S. Army Gen. Charles Flynn, a four-star officer who once commanded U.S. Army Pacific, attended Shen Yun for the first time.
"The colors, the stories, and the quality of the dance and music," Flynn said, "were all just beautiful." He singled out the dancers' synchronization, the women's water-sleeve dance with its long silk extensions, and the closing pieces, which he said carried themes of redemption, sacrifice, and respect for others.
But what he emphasized was the part depicted on stage that many may not appreciate the extent of: the CCP's continued persecution of Falun Gong practitioners inside China today. "Not enough information is being communicated outside of China about what is happening there," Flynn said. He called the regime's behavior “abhorrent.”
‘More Than a Show’
The Shen Yun Performing Arts opening night at Lincoln Center in New York City on March 26, 2026. Larry Dye/The Epoch Times
On the opposite end of the season, Tony Lyons, founder and president of Skyhorse Publishing, took his seat at the Lincoln Center David H. Koch Theater on April 11—Shen Yun's last Manhattan show of the year. Lyons said he had not known until that night that Shen Yun was an American company, founded and trained in upstate New York by artists who had fled religious persecution.
Watching it in the year of America's 250th anniversary, he said, felt fitting. He left the theater convinced that the preservation work he was witnessing on stage was the same kind of work he was trying to do in his own field—building something real in a culture watching its traditions erode. "This was really authentic," Lyons said.
For Jim Beckwith, a retired North Carolina law professor and former editor of the state bar association's business law journal, the calculus was simpler. He attended Shen Yun in Raleigh on March 8 and said he had not gone for the art alone.
“I came here because it's a moral issue,” he said. Preserving an ancient culture, he argued, was the foundation of any civilization—and something Marxist ideology could not produce.
On the World Stage
Buenos Aires Provincial Representative Juan José Esper attends Shen Yun Performing Arts at the Teatro Ópera in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on April 9, 2026. NTD
The same high-profile turnouts followed abroad, often in defiance of direct pressure from Beijing on local officials not to attend.
In Buenos Aires, on April 9, provincial representative Juan José Esper attended Shen Yun's opening night at the Teatro Ópera and personally thanked the company's artistic director. "I thank you for choosing Argentina as well," he said.
A night later in the same theater, the renowned Argentine playwright and director Pepe Cibrián—a leading figure in his country's musical theater scene—sat in the audience he had so often performed for himself. He left with a message for those who hadn't yet been. "They should come, because it's a unique show that isn't easy to see again," he said.
In Avellino, Italy, on Feb. 20, Sergio Rastrelli, an Italian senator for the Campania Region, returned for his latest Shen Yun performance. Rastrelli, who had seen Shen Yun before and now considers himself a superfan, said the production was a tribute to a Chinese culture that pre-dated the Communist Party and that Italy had a responsibility to keep hosting.
"It is a sumptuous, superb, and moving show," he said. He called on Italy to keep its theaters open to Shen Yun against pressure from the Chinese regime. All 64,000 tickets for Shen Yun's Italian run had sold out before opening night.
In Valencia, Spain, regional deputies and city councillors filed into the Palau de les Arts Reina Sofía on March 9 for Shen Yun's second evening performance—turning out despite pressure from the Chinese Embassy on Spanish officials not to attend.
Noelia Císcar Martínez enjoyed Shen Yun’s evening performance at the Palau de les Arts in Valencia, Spain, on March 9, 2026. NTD
Valencian regional deputy Noelia Císcar Martínez stepped out at the end of the night beaming. "The show is wonderful, it's a fantasy, it's a dream," she said.
In southern France, Michel Pichan caught Shen Yun in Toulouse on April 28. Mayor of Saint-Lizier and president of the Ariège Tourism Development Agency, and the father of a son who has danced professionally with major European companies, Pichan said he had come with the discerning eye of someone used to contemporary and classical ballet. "It was extraordinary," he said.
What the Artists Saw
Among audience members who work in dance and music themselves, the reactions ran from technical respect to something closer to tears.
In Seattle on April 5, the acclaimed Argentine ballet star Maximiliano Guerra and his wife Myriam Barroso, also a dancer, attended their first Shen Yun show. Asked afterward how he would describe the show to those who hadn't yet seen it, Guerra said it would “transform” anyone who saw it.
Teacher and dancer Hana Kochová Breburdová attends Shen Yun Performing Arts at the Prague Congress Center in Czech Republic on April 17, 2026. NTD
In Prague on April 17, Czech dancer and teacher Hana Kochová Breburdová—who has been to Shen Yun every year for several years—said the technical level on stage was the highest she had ever seen. "I go every year, and I'm always thrilled," she said.
In Logroño, Spain, on March 14, internationally acclaimed Irish-American singer and composer John Kelly and his wife, the Spanish soprano Maite Itoiz, attended the matinee. Kelly, a core member of the platinum-selling group The Kelly Family, said the live orchestra alone was beyond price—and that the dancing reached him in a way he had not expected.
"It's about something higher than ourselves, which I would call a divine force," Kelly said.
Sitting beside him, Itoiz had been holding back tears since the curtain rose.
"As soon as the curtain opened and I saw the celestial world, I was almost in tears," she said. The opening scene—celestial figures in a heavenly world, then sent down to earth—had hit her with what she described as a kind of long-buried memory: a feeling that human beings all came from somewhere they could call home, and were still hoping to return.
‘We Feel Safeguarded’
That was not, this season, an unusual reaction. Across continents, audience members—many of them with no prior connection to Chinese culture—used spiritual language to describe what they had seen.
Michael Spenner and Anastassia Spenner attend a Shen Yun Performing Arts performance at the Royal Arena in Copenhagen, Denmark, on April 1, 2026. Mary Man/The Epoch Times
In Vancouver on April 8, Calgary pastor Brandon Pringle and his wife Karina flew nearly 700 kilometers across western Canada to attend Shen Yun. They said that adding to their motivation was the cancellation of the company's Toronto shows at the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts in late March and early April after a series of bomb threats Canadian police deemed unfounded and investigators have traced to China-linked sources.
After sustained pressure from show presenters, Shen Yun was rescheduled to return June 25–28 with enhanced security.
"We were very blessed when we confirmed our tickets," Pringle said.
In Copenhagen on April 1, Danish psychotherapists and healers Michael and Anastassia Spenner attended at the Royal Arena. They live on the small island of Møn, south of the capital, and run a counseling and healing practice together. Both said they felt a sacred energy moving through the theater. "The performance harmonizes very well with our work," Michael Spenner said.
They walked out, the couple said, "satisfied and safeguarded" by what they described as a divine presence.
In Porto Alegre, Brazil, on May 9, nurse Ana Lúcia Chagas Silva attended with her husband, a veteran Brazilian corporate executive. Silva said the closing scene of the show—the one in which divine figures appear on stage—broke something open in her.
"Especially the final scene, where the divine appears, transmitted a tremendous amount of energy," she said. She described the yellow light pouring across the stage as a kind of bridge: a connection that, in her words, was already inside everyone, if only they were open to it.
‘Beautiful Things Are Happening’: Fans Who Keep Coming Back
Some of the most striking testimonials of the season came not from VIPs but from ordinary audience members who had reshaped parts of their lives around the show.
In Tokyo on May 13—the closing night of Shen Yun's Japan tour—a superfan named Masuo Nobuhisa attended his 21st performance of the year, bringing his lifetime total to roughly 50.
Retired veterinarian Heriberto Vidal Rey enjoyed Shen Yun New York Company’s performance at the Riojaforum Theatre in Logroño, Spain, on the evening of March 13, 2026. NTD
In Logroño, retired Spanish veterinarian Heriberto Vidal Rey arrived in Spain's wine country with a motorhome group from Asturias, continuing the road trip he had started the year before. He said he found the show "always magnificent."
The show also drew large organized parties. In California, a visual arts professor in Sacramento who had seen Shen Yun the previous year, brought 55 of his own students this spring as a class field trip.
In Curitiba, Brazil, on April 26, a travel agency owner named Janine pulled together a 24-person group that drove roughly 400 miles from Florianópolis to catch the matinee—her first time bringing a group, after seeing the show herself in 2024.
In France, where Shen Yun has built a particularly strong reputation, local travel agencies have begun selling "Shen Yun day-trip" packages around the tour; on March 14, more than a dozen tour buses pulled up to a single venue.
Many ethnic Chinese fans flew from overseas to Japan just to catch a show.
In Washington on opening night Jan. 7 at the Kennedy Center, freelance musician Matthew Woods left the theater convinced he was watching the beginning of a renaissance. "Beautiful things are happening," he said. "We're moving forward in a positive way."
Shen Yun Performing Arts lands in Taoyuan International Airport in Taipei, Taiwan, on Dec. 28, 2025. NTD
What China Had Let Go
The season's tightest market was Taiwan. Between Dec. 30, 2025, and Feb. 8, 2026, Shen Yun's New Era Company gave 33 performances across seven Taiwanese cities. Every single show sold out. On closing night in Taichung, a sudden cold front rolled in just as the tour was wrapping up; ticketless patrons stood outside in the chill anyway, hoping the venue would release more seats. It did.
In Kamakura, Japan, on April 18, Shoji Tōko, a Japanese tea-ceremony instructor whose husband once led a research institute under a major Japanese food conglomerate, watched the show with what she said was a feeling closer to mourning than awe.
The Way of Tea, she noted, had originally come to Japan from China centuries ago. Watching Shen Yun on stage in 2026, she said, she could not stop wondering how the country that had given that culture to the world had let it go.
"Why did they let such magnificent Chinese philosophies and traditions slip away?" she said.
