A LIFE THAT PRECEDES THE ROLE.

There are appointments, and then there are appointments that carry the weight of a whole biography. When Queensland Ballet announced in July 2012 that Li Cunxin would become its fifth Artistic Director, the decision did not merely fill a vacancy. It brought into the company’s orbit one of the most storied lives in the history of Australian cultural life — a man who had been selected from poverty by the agents of a communist state to dance ballet, who had defected to the West in a standoff that required the intervention of a United States Vice President, who had danced with the Houston Ballet for sixteen years and risen to principal rank, who had retired from the stage to become a stockbroker, and who had then written one of the most read Australian memoirs of the early twenty-first century. The appointment of Li Cunxin was not simply a hiring decision. It was a statement about what Queensland Ballet believed it could become.

That belief proved prescient. Over eleven years — from 2012 until his retirement at the end of 2023 — Li presided over a transformation of Queensland Ballet that touched every dimension of the company: its size, its repertoire, its physical home, its training structures, its international reach, and its standing within Australian cultural life. The company he inherited was accomplished and admired. The company he left behind was operating at a different scale altogether, in possession of a dedicated heritage home, an expanded academy, a world-stage repertoire, and a reputation that drew attention from ballet circles far beyond the southern hemisphere.

To understand what that transformation meant — and why it mattered not only to Queensland Ballet but to Brisbane’s emerging civic identity — it is necessary to understand something of the man himself, and of the institution he was trusted to lead.

FROM SHANDONG TO THE STAGE OF THE WORLD.

Li Cunxin AO was born in 1961 in the Li Commune, near the city of Qingdao on the coast of north-east China. The sixth of seven sons in a poor rural family, his peasant life in Chairman Mao’s communist China changed dramatically when, at the age of eleven, he was chosen by Madame Mao’s cultural advisers to become a student at the Beijing Dance Academy. The circumstances of that selection carry the particular quality of historical contingency that characterises Li’s life from its earliest chapters: born into bitter poverty in rural Qingdao, there were certain years when the peasants in his village even ate tree bark to survive.

He was eleven when he left home to begin a seven-year harsh training regime from 5.30am to 9pm, six days a week at the Beijing Dance Academy. Once he found his passion, he worked hard and gave his all. He would practise his turns at night by candlelight, and hopped, one-legged, up and down stairs with heavy sandbags tied to his ankles to build leg strength at 5am in the mornings when others were still asleep.

The turn toward the West came through Ben Stevenson, the Artistic Director of the Houston Ballet, who visited the Beijing Dance Academy as part of an early cultural delegation from America during the period of China’s gradual opening after the late 1970s. Stevenson taught master classes at the Beijing Dance Academy where Li was just about to graduate, and singled him out along with another student to offer them two scholarships. Li was one of the first students from the Beijing Dance Academy to go to the United States under financial support from the central government of the People’s Republic of China. After his study at the summer school, Li defected to the West. He was held in the Chinese Consulate in Houston, his defection creating headlines in America. After twenty-one hours of negotiations, and intervention by then Vice President George H.W. Bush, Li was allowed to stay in the United States as a free man, but his Chinese citizenship was revoked.

What followed was a career of extraordinary achievement on the international stage. Li subsequently danced with the Houston Ballet for sixteen years, during which he won two silver and a bronze medal at International Ballet Competitions. While dancing in London, he met ballerina Mary McKendry from Rockhampton, Australia. In 1995 they moved to Melbourne, Australia, with their two children. Li became a principal dancer with the Australian Ballet. After retiring from the stage in 1999, he built a second career in finance, working as a senior manager at a major stockbroking firm in Australia. And then, in 2003, he published the memoir that would cement his place in Australian literary culture.

Mao’s Last Dancer is a memoir written by Chinese-Australian ballet dancer and author Li Cunxin and first published in 2003. It recounts his journey from a young, impoverished village boy destined to labor in the fields of China to a world-famous professional dancer. The book won the Book of the Year Award in Australia, the Christopher Award in America, and was shortlisted for the National Biography Award among other prestigious literary awards. It stayed on the top ten bestseller list for over one and a half years and has been published and sold in over twenty countries. The memoir was adapted into a 2009 feature film directed by Bruce Beresford.

It was this man — dancer, defector, author, financier — who arrived in Brisbane in 2013 to take up leadership of a sixty-year-old state ballet company.

THE INSTITUTION HE INHERITED.

Queensland Ballet’s lineage is worth holding clearly in mind, because it matters to understanding what Li was building upon. In 1960, Charles Lisner founded the Lisner Ballet Company. The company was re-named Queensland Ballet in 1962 and became one of the first ballet ensembles in Australia to tour regionally, a commitment that continues today. Queensland Ballet’s founding Artistic Director, Charles Lisner, trained with Édouard Borovansky and danced with the Borovansky Australian Ballet prior to travelling to London to continue his dance studies with the Sadler’s Wells Ballet School. He later joined The Royal Ballet, Covent Garden.

That foundation — built by a French-born dancer who mortgaged his own home to bring professional ballet to a Queensland that had none, who chose Brisbane precisely because it lacked any professional performing arts company — established a culture of ambition operating under material constraint that would define the company for decades. Harold Collins was appointed Artistic Director in 1978 and led the company until his retirement in 1997. During that time, he presented memorable productions and continued to commission new Australian works in contemporary and classical styles, forging the enduring relationship between Queensland Ballet and the Queensland Dance School of Excellence. François Klaus was appointed Artistic Director and Chief Choreographer in 1988. Over fifteen years, Klaus contributed nearly one hundred new ballet works to the company’s repertoire, from new productions of classic ballets to works designed especially to appeal to families. Included in his repertoire is the immensely popular Cloudland, a tribute to Brisbane’s post-war era set in the once famous Cloudland Ballroom.

Li would be the fifth Artistic Director in the company’s fifty-two-year history, and the first curatorial Artistic Director. That curatorial distinction mattered. Li came not as a choreographer — his predecessors had all created works for the company — but as a director whose vision would be expressed through what he chose to program and commission, what relationships he cultivated with international choreographers and companies, and what institutional architecture he constructed around the art form. The role he was stepping into had a different grammar than any previous occupant had practised.

Already an internationally acclaimed ballet dancer, author and motivational public speaker, this would be Li Cunxin’s debut as an Artistic Director. The first-time director brought with him, however, something that no accumulated choreographic credit could substitute: a name and a story that carried weight across cultures and across generations. Mao’s Last Dancer was not merely a memoir. It was a cultural bridge of unusual span, and Li would bring that quality of reach into everything he did at Queensland Ballet.

THE ARCHITECTURE OF TRANSFORMATION.

The word “transformation” is often applied loosely to institutional change. In the case of Queensland Ballet under Li Cunxin, the evidence is specific and measurable. After commencing in the role in 2012, Li stood on the shoulders of all those who had gone before him and took Queensland Ballet to even greater heights. He doubled the dancer ensemble to a world-class company of 48 dancers. A world-class ensemble of 48 dancers. A world-class young artists program of twelve dancers — the Jette Parker Young Artists Program. A world-stage repertoire. Seventy company seasons, 880-plus performances and 565,000-plus tickets sold. A world-class Academy in its standalone, dedicated home at Kelvin Grove State College.

These figures represent a genuine scaling of institutional capacity, not merely a refinement of what already existed. The Jette Parker Young Artists Program created a formal pathway between emerging talent and the main company — a structured pipeline that companies of the first rank all over the world have long recognised as essential to long-term vitality. The Queensland Ballet Academy, built upon the foundation of earlier training programs and the legacy of Charles Lisner, became under Li’s direction an institution with its own dedicated facilities and its own identity within the state’s educational landscape. Building upon the legacy of Charles Lisner and the Queensland Dance School of Excellence, Queensland Ballet implemented its own training programs in order to meet a new artistic vision under the direction of Li Cunxin. Queensland Ballet consolidated its programs, creating the Queensland Ballet Academy. The Queensland Ballet Academy then opened its state-of-the-art training facilities in Kelvin Grove.

The repertoire expanded in ambition and in geographic reach. In August 2015, the company performed Peter Schaufuss’ La Sylphide at the London Coliseum. In November 2018, they embarked on a China tour, performing Liam Scarlett’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream to audiences in Shanghai, Suzhou, Beijing, and Xi’an. The China tour carried its own weight of symbolism: Queensland Ballet, led by the man who had defected from the People’s Republic of China as a young dancer, performing in the country’s great cultural centres. History turned through a full rotation.

Li has been recognised for his dedication and commitment to growing the size and calibre of the company, having programmed adventurous works into their repertoire, incorporated additional international tours, and founding the development of the Queensland Ballet Academy and Thomas Dixon Centre.

A HOME WORTHY OF THE VISION.

Among the most durable legacies of Li Cunxin’s directorship is the transformation of the Thomas Dixon Centre in Brisbane’s West End. Listed on the Queensland Heritage Register, the Thomas Dixon Centre is an iconic West End building redeveloped into a home for the state’s ballet company. Originally commissioned by Thomas Dixon in 1908 to house a shoe and boot factory and designed by prominent Queensland architect Richard Gailey, the building encompasses its original Georgian Revival-style design and is a rare surviving example of an early twentieth century industrial factory in West End.

Queensland Ballet had been based at the Thomas Dixon Centre since 1991, but the building had long been pressed beyond its means. Li arrived in 2012 with a clear sense that the physical infrastructure required to support the company he envisioned had not yet been built. The redevelopment that followed was a decade in conception and realisation. Following the 2022 refurbishment, the innovative design combining old and new now features six dance studios, a 350-seat theatre, production and costume workshops, stunning public art, and a rooftop terrace. In 2022, the Thomas Dixon Centre started a new life again, as an artistic and community destination. Architects Conrad Gargett, the Queensland Government and Queensland Ballet worked collaboratively to design a centre conducive to performing arts and community engagement, whilst retaining the original building at its heart. The multi-storey building features an interplay of heritage elements and contemporary architecture. The iconic red brick façade has been preserved, with nods to this rare Brisbane example of Georgian Revival-style architecture celebrated throughout.

For Li Cunxin, a confluence of two historic events brought his life into perspective: his tenth anniversary as Artistic Director of Queensland Ballet coincided with the official opening of Queensland Ballet’s new home at the Thomas Dixon Centre — fulfilling a transformation he had envisioned from when he first started with the company. The Thomas Dixon Centre’s rooftop terrace carries a particular significance: the Kite Terrace hovers above the Talbot Theatre, celebrating Queensland’s wide blue skies and Brisbane’s city views, and paying tribute to the home company’s fifth Artistic Director, Li Cunxin AO.

It is this quality — institutional permanence expressed through physical form — that marks the Thomas Dixon Centre’s redevelopment as something more than a building project. Under Li, Queensland Ballet moved from tenants improvising within an inherited structure to an institution whose physical home had been designed around the specific demands of its artistic mission. That shift, from accommodation to ownership of purpose, is one of the defining achievements of his tenure.

The permanent civic digital address for this institution, ballet.queensland, exists in the same spirit: an anchor point for Queensland Ballet’s identity in the onchain civic layer that is being laid alongside Brisbane’s physical and cultural infrastructure in this period of rapid change.

THE MEASURE OF ELEVEN YEARS.

Leadership of any institution of scale over a sustained period generates its own form of evidence. The commentary that attended Li Cunxin’s retirement in 2023 offers a useful register of how his directorship was perceived from within and beyond the Australian context.

"Over the last decade and more, Li Cunxin has transformed the Queensland Ballet into a world-class company with a vibrant repertoire and brilliant ensemble of dancers. With his passion, artistic integrity and fearless energy, he has been a powerfully positive advocate for ballet in Australia and a dynamic force for dance worldwide."

Those words, from Kevin O’Hare, Director of The Royal Ballet in London, carry institutional weight. The Royal Ballet does not routinely issue eulogies for regional company directors. That it did so here — and in terms this emphatic — reflects the standing that Queensland Ballet had achieved in the international ballet community under Li’s direction.

In the 2019 Birthday Honours, Cunxin was appointed Officer of the Order of Australia for “distinguished service to the performing arts, particularly to ballet, as a dancer and artistic director”. On 11 December 2023, at the graduation ceremony of the University of Queensland, Li was honoured with the degree of Honorary Doctor of Letters, and gave the graduation speech. These are markers of civic recognition, not merely artistic reputation — the formal acknowledgement of a contribution to Queensland’s cultural life that extended beyond any single season or production.

Li himself reflected on this directly: “Obviously I had wonderful success as a dancer, success as a stockbroker, as an author. But I have to say one of the most rewarding, most satisfying chapters of my life would have to be directing the Queensland Ballet.” There is something in that ordering — dancer, stockbroker, author, director — that speaks to the quality of the man. The directorship mattered most not because it was the most glamorous or the most remunerative role, but because it was the most generative. It was the work of building rather than performing, of creating conditions in which others could realise their potential rather than realising one’s own.

On 20 June 2023, Li announced that he and his wife Mary would retire at the end of 2023. Li cited a heart condition, and Mary had been undergoing treatment for cancer. Reflecting on his eleven years as Artistic Director, Li said the growth of the company and its impact in terms of jobs, audiences, participation, and impact were a result of the hard work and passion of the entire team at Queensland Ballet. “I’m incredibly grateful to have been surrounded by a contagious energy, an unbreakable spirit of dancers, creatives and of course, all of our dedicated supporters.”

“I have been but a guardian of our ballet company these past 11 years,” Li said. “Keep believing in Queensland Ballet as our company moves forward into exciting times.”

SUCCESSION AND CONTINUITY.

One measure of institutional health is what happens after a transformational leader departs. A global search for Li’s successor — Queensland Ballet’s sixth Artistic Director — was underway shortly after his retirement announcement. Rockhampton-born former principal dancer with The Royal Ballet, Leanne Benjamin, was appointed Artistic Director in 2024. That the global search for Li’s successor produced an appointment of that calibre — a Rockhampton-born artist who had risen to principal rank at The Royal Ballet in London — reflects the institutional standing that Queensland Ballet had accumulated. Companies that have not built genuine international reputations do not attract candidates of that standing. The quality of the succession is itself evidence of the quality of what preceded it.

The structures Li built — the expanded dancer ensemble, the academy, the Jette Parker Young Artists Program, the refurbished heritage home, the international touring relationships — do not retire when the director retires. They persist as the operating architecture of the institution. In that sense, the transformation Li Cunxin led is not a chapter that has ended but a foundation on which the company continues to build.

Building upon the legacy of Charles Lisner and the Queensland Dance School of Excellence, Queensland Ballet implemented its own training programs in order to meet a new artistic vision under the direction of Li Cunxin. The same logic now applies in reverse: future artistic directors will build upon the legacy of Li Cunxin and the structures he created. Institutional life has this quality of accumulated weight — each director inheriting and adding to what the previous ones made possible.

PERMANENCE, IDENTITY, AND THE CIVIC RECORD.

The story of Li Cunxin’s directorship of Queensland Ballet is, in one reading, a story about what becomes possible when a person of unusual biography is trusted with an institution of genuine potential. But it is also a story about Queensland itself — about what a state company can become when it is given the ambition to be something other than a local curiosity.

Queensland Ballet today occupies a specific position in Australian cultural life: the state company of a state that is preparing to host the 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games, operating from a heritage-listed building in West End whose civic significance extends well beyond the ballet world, anchored in training structures that reach into the next generation. The institution’s identity has depth and permanence that it did not fully possess sixty years ago when Charles Lisner mortgaged his home to start a professional company in a city that had none.

Civic identity in this period is increasingly both physical and digital — expressed in buildings and streets, but also in the permanent onchain layer of addressability that is being established alongside physical infrastructure. ballet.queensland is the address at which Queensland Ballet’s institutional identity is anchored in that permanent civic record: a namespace that does not expire, does not redirect, and does not depend on any single platform’s continued existence. It is, in the logic of the Queensland Foundation’s onchain identity project, the equivalent of a civic plaque on a heritage-listed building — a permanent marker that this institution exists, that it belongs to Queensland, and that its history is part of the state’s civic inheritance.

Li Cunxin understood institutions. He understood that the art form needs a building, that the building needs a story, that the story needs to be told across time, and that what endures is not any individual’s achievement but the capacity of the institution to keep exceeding what it was the year before. The company he helped build is now part of that permanent record. The leap, as it turns out, landed.