The couple met at the Beijing Dance Academy and married in 1991. Both of them had been principal dancers with the National Ballet of China from 1987 to 1992 and joined the US ballet company BalletMet in Columbus, Ohio, before dancing with the Pittsburgh Ballet Theater for 12 years until 2006.
Li once performed as Juliet in Romeo and Juliet, a ballet produced by the National Ballet of China in 1992 with her husband, Pan, as Romeo. Thus, Romeo and Juliet became the company's first original full-length ballet work, which premiered in 2010 and later toured both home and abroad.
"My goal of launching the Suzhou Ballet Theater was to create original Chinese ballet works, not just telling Chinese stories but also interpreting Western classics with a Chinese angle," Li says.
"Chinese ballet companies are devoted to creating original Chinese ballet works which tell Chinese stories. For example, the first generation of Chinese ballet artists created Red Detachment of Women, which premiered in 1964 by the National Ballet of China and has become a classic and is still performed home and abroad. There are many great stories, like Ding Xiang, which inspire today's artists," says Suzhou Ballet Theatre's president Wang Quanxing, the former deputy director of the National Ballet of China.
