Mongolians are circus stars all over the world, except at home
It’s cold as a walk-in refrigerator in the Mongolian Circus School, housed in a once-proud building now on the verge of collapse with cracked walls, moldy ceilings and the stale smell of decades of cigarette smoke embedded in the hall’s wooden frame.
A group of teenage acrobats shrug off the icy, ragged surroundings to practice jumping and somersaulting through the air, kicking up dust as they land and enduring the barking of a gruff instructor who needles them after every imperfection.
Outside on a dirt driveway, a pair of girls in leotards, one 11 and the other 13, tiptoe around puddles of muddy water to practice one of the most difficult and dangerous contortionist poses, the Marinelli bend. They bite on a piece of leather attached to the end of a metal stand and use their jaws to lift their bodies. They muster enough strength to curl back until their buttocks rest on the back of their heads and their legs extend in front of their faces like a scorpion’s tail.
The agility and determination of young people like these help explain why Mongolia produces some of the most coveted circus performers in the world for big names like Cirque du Soleil and Ringling Brothers. This is despite a lack of government support and a lack of training facilities. The 83-year-old building of the Mongolian Circus School is one of the few places where professionals and students can still prepare.
“We are wanted all over the world, but we can’t even train properly in our own country,” said Gerelbaatar Yunden, a former acrobat and ringmaster who estimates there are about 1,300 Mongolian performers currently working in North America and Europe.
The story of how Mongolia, a sparsely populated country about the size of Alaska, ended up having so much talent and eventually sending so much talent abroad has its roots in the country’s former state circus.
This homegrown circus once required many trained performers. But that hasn’t been the case for years, and so there has been an exodus, caused in part by the sale of that circus to a famous Mongolian sumo wrestler, who mastered Japan’s most sacred sport but failed to deliver on his promise . promise to revive Mongolia’s cherished tradition.
While Mongolian contortionists have practiced this art form for centuries – mainly for the pleasure of the nobility – the idea of combining the discipline with music, clowns, animals and acrobats under one roof only took root in 1931. circus performers toured Mongolia, then a Soviet satellite state.
Mongolians were so enthralled by the visiting Russians that they sent students to Moscow to learn how to put together a similar show. Those students came back and founded the first Mongolian circus in 1940. They found a home in what is now the crumbling Mongolian Circus School, a squat, circular building meant to resemble the country’s ubiquitous nomadic tents known as a ger.
Three decades later, in 1971, Romania, a fellow socialist country, helped Mongolia build a modern circus facility that could accommodate thousands more people, its blue-domed roof standing out amid the drab Soviet cityscape. style of Ulaanbaatar. For a developing country, the new circus was the pinnacle of entertainment. Generations of Mongolians attended the state show every year, dazzled by the glittering costumes, orchestra and deadly performances.
“People loved it because it was modern,” said Mr. Gerelbaatar, 43, who remembers going to the circus as early as the 1980s. “It was different from traditional art. It was something new.”
The show fell on hard times after Mongolia began phasing out its state-owned economy in the wake of the 1990 democratic revolution. Over the next decade, the government could no longer afford to maintain the circus and began looking for buyers.
One of the most famous Mongolians at the time was a sumo champion named Dagvadorj Dolgorsuren, better known by his Japanese professional name Asashoryu. A dominant force in sumo for much of the 2000s, Asashoryu was also considered the sport’s enfant terrible and was the target of xenophobic treatment in Japan. He raised hackles for breaking sumo’s rigid etiquette by flashing a smile after a victory and not giving in to an older wrestler in the hallway of a bathhouse.
Asashoryu was revered in Mongolia, where he was also a major investor in real estate and mining. In 2007 he bought the circus and promised to restore the show to its former glory. He said he would allow artists to train for free in the modern arena and increase salaries to attract more talent. He called his new production the Asa Circus.
Dashdendev Nyam, who had performed abroad as an acrobat and juggler, rushed back to Mongolia after hearing of the sale. He wanted to see if there were new possibilities at home.
The new owner’s promises soon turned out to be too good to be true. According to Mr Dashdendev, Asashoryu often wanted artists to work without pay. He strictly limited access to the blue dome training location. And the few artists offered contracts had no guarantee they would be retained for more than a year. The circus, which was already limping when Asashoryu bought it, was left with a skeleton crew, performing only a handful of shows every few months.
“Everyone started giving up after a few years,” says Dashdendev, 38, who eventually found work while touring the United States with the Ringling Brothers. “We were very sad because it felt like our heritage and culture were being taken away.”
Asashoryu and the Mongolian Ministry of Culture did not respond to requests for comment.
Artists have banded together in recent years to pressure the government to provide more training space, but to no avail. Meanwhile, Asashoryu’s arena is largely used for concerts, not circus productions or training. The location, which has been under renovation since 2018, is now closed off by a temporary fence, destroyed by graffiti.
The situation has frustrated performers like Tsatsral Erdenebileg, a contortionist at Cirque du Soleil’s “Zumanity” in Las Vegas. Without a clean, safe space for young people to learn, she fears the country’s circus tradition will eventually disappear.
The Mongolian Circus School building “has no hot water, no heating and not enough light,” said Ms. Tsatsral, 36, holder of the Guinness World Record for the longest Marinelli bend. “It’s dangerous for children to be there.”
Ms Tsatsral, who has been performing since she was a young girl, said she would have devoted her career to a state-backed national circus if there had been one in Mongolia. Instead, she had no choice but to perform abroad.
Leaving Mongolia can be harrowing for young artists, Ms. Tsatsral said, noting that some are abused by agents seeking crooked contracts. For her, moving to Las Vegas was difficult given the extreme climate differences compared to Mongolia. After arriving, she had a vitamin D deficiency because she almost never went outside to avoid the heat.
A saving grace for living so far from home is the abundance of compatriots performing alongside her. There are so many of them that they call themselves the “Mongolian Squirm Mafia,” Ms. Tsatsral said. On days off they eat Mongolian food and share the latest gossip from home.
“We have each other, but I still miss my home very much,” Ms. Tsatsral said. “My dream is to teach the young Mongolian generation so they can go to Cirque du Soleil, but where am I going to teach?”
Khaliun Bayartsogt contributed to reporting from Ulaanbaatar.