Mongolia dispatch

       Mongolians Are Circus Stars All Over the World, Except at Home

       Contortionists and acrobats with celestial skills train in squalid conditions as the promise of a former sumo wrestler to restore the national circus to its past glory has gone mostly unfulfilled.

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       By David Pierson

       David Pierson visited the Mongolian Circus School in the country’s capital, Ulaanbaatar, where he interviewed students, teachers and professional performers.

       Dec. 25, 2023

       It’s cold as a walk-in refrigerator at the Mongolian Circus School, housed in a once proud edifice now on the verge of collapse with cracked walls, moldy ceilings and the stale smell of decades of cigarette smoke embedded into the venue’s wooden frame.

       A group of teenage acrobats shrug off the frigid, fraying surroundings to practice leaping and somersaulting through the air, kicking up dust as they land, and enduring the bark of a gruff instructor needling them after each imperfection.

       Outside on an unpaved 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 a pad of leather attached to the end of a metal stand and use their jaws to help lift up their bodies. They muster enough strength to curl backward until their buttocks rest on the back of their heads and their legs stretch out in front of their faces like a scorpion’s tail.

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       David Pierson covers Chinese foreign policy and China’s economic and cultural engagement with the world. He has been a journalist for more than two decades. More about David Pierson

       A version of this article appears in print on Dec. 26, 2023, Section A , Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Training Stars For the Big Top Far From Home . Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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