By Hyung-Jin Kim
No more elephant and monkey acts. No more death-defying motorbike stunts. No more singing or acting on stage.
Several hundred spectators still clapped constantly when acrobats with Dongchoon Circus Troupe, South Korea’s last and 100-year-old circus, twirled on a long suspended fabric, juggled clubs on a large, rotating wheel and rode a unicycle on a tightrope under the big top.
“As I recall the hardship that I’ve gone through, I think I’ve done something significant,” Park Sae-hwan, the head of the circus, said in a recent Associated Press interview. “But I also feel heavy responsibility because if Dongchoon stops, our country’s circus, one genre in our performing arts, will disappear. That’s the problem.”
The golden age of circuses
Founded in 1925, Dongchoon is Korea’s oldest circus. In the golden ages of South Korean circuses in the 1960s when most households still had no TVs, Dongchoon travelled across the
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