Dynamic Yunnan was the result of years long research by Yang Liping to find local dancers among the 26 ethnic minorities of Yunnan (including the Bai). It won many awards in China and played to packed audiences.
Spread wide across the valley, Dali does not have the large cultural institutions of Kunming, the capital of Yunnan. Even its Photographic Festival – one of the earliest in China – has an attractive modesty about it. But Yang Liping’s commissioning of the Yang Liping Performing Arts Center is the exception to the ‘modesty’ rule. 
She commissioned the Beijing based architect Zhu Pei – well respected for the design of galleries and for the Minsheng Museum of Modern Art in Beijing – to build a performing arts centre. It was opened in 2020.
When we speak to Zhu Pei, he is at pains to stress that he was trying to be responsive to the cultural and natural landscape of Dali. The Center is a ‘meeting place’ – he says; he is impatient with the orthodoxy that a performing arts centre must be a black box. The space is open to the elements, integrated into the landscape, where an audience can even sit informally on the stairs going up to the roof to watch a performance. We ask Zhu Pei if he has any sympathy with Salman Rushdie’s Shame when the author says ‘Roots, I sometimes think, are a conservative myth, designed to keep us in our places.’
The architect demurs, saying architecture without roots risks being fantasy architecture. He thought only of the local population when designing the performance arts centre, he says. Of course, those who run the building, make it live – Zhu Pei knows that architecture is incomplete without being populated – need to think of audiences as widely as possible. The centre opened with a major work devoted to the local culture with music and dance, and designs by Tim Yip (probably still best known as the Art Director of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon).
Sadly the Zero Covid policy has so far laid waste to the idea of a regular programme whose ambition is to be a promiscuous mix – from rock concerts to dance. (Across China, the Golden Week tourism figures are the worst since 2014, according to the authoritative COTRI agency).
Talking to Dalian locals, there were several views of the Center – that there is a danger it will simply reproduce the culture common across China; another that it will become largely a home for Yang Liping and her networks. And yet, it is perfectly possible to argue that a centre such as Yang Liping’s which marries local, national and international is exactly what Dali needs.
On the other hand, China’s Zero Covid policy is intact and there are certainly grounds for concern that the Chinese government’s idea of cultural security will mean less and less opportunities for international cultural connections, as well as less encouragement of cultural diversity.