‘The Night That Changed Their Lives’: Hope and Expectation Among Young Mongolian Contortionists

This post was written by Liz Fox, a UCL ESRC-funded anthropology PhD student affiliated to the Emerging Subjects project.  Liz is currently in Mongolia carrying out research examining the lives of young urban women in Mongolia, such as contortionists and cashmere factory workers. Her research aims to explore how young women’s aspirations for their futures articulate with national visions in practices and industries that carry particular national weight.

It is 6am at Chinggis Khaan International Airport.[1] Outside the crisp morning air of a late-winter morning in Ulaanbaatar still carries the bonfire scent of last night’s coal fires. Our little group gathers around a collection of small suitcases and two semi-circular, army-green canvas bags with the words ‘CIRCUS MGL’ stencilled in white spray-paint. Tsomo takes a length of red and gold ribbon from her backpack and, using scissors borrowed from the men that wrap luggage with oversized rolls of kitchen wrap, divides it into short sections to tie in bows on the handles of our bags. “Now we are all one group,” she explains and checks over our passports and tickets one more time. Anujin and Eda – the two young contortionists – hug their families goodbye, who, in turn, wish us a good trip “Sain yawaarai” and the four of us head through to check in.

Eda and Anujin have been training in contortion since their respective parents first noticed their flexibility in childhood.  This will not only be their first experience of a competitive circus festival, but also their first journey to Europe, a place in which they both hope to one day live and work. Tsomo, their teacher, is a third generation circus performer, who also trained and toured as a contortionist before leaving the circus world at age 19 to attend university. Ten years later, following the death of her grandfather she felt compelled not to let her family’s circus heritage come to an end, and so returned to teaching at the invitation of a successful private circus director. One month ago, a former superstar of Mongolian contortion, now based in Germany, invited Tsomo to bring an act to the 2nd Waldoni Circus Festival where she will be on the jury. Since then the girls have been preparing their ‘number’ at least 4 days a week, 3 hours a day, after school and on Saturdays.

Training is an immense commitment for a young person, it takes them away from school and friends and, as many see it, including Eda and Anujin, there are only two possible futures: success or failure. Either they will find jobs in international circuses, or they will have effectively wasted their youth on a failed dream. A fact that intensifies this situation is the reality of aging. There is disagreement over when a contortionist ‘peaks’, but the late teenage years are certainly a make-or-break time. If a contortionist is not offered a contract as she is finishing high school, it is probably time to ‘re-invest’ in something else, such as university. As such, for Anujin and Eda in 10^th and 12^th grades respectively, their hopes and anticipations for the competition could not have been higher. It is common knowledge that working as a contortionist in Mongolia is effectively impossible: the contracts are short-term, few in number and the pay is poor.  The chance to showcase their hard-earned talents in front of a European audience was effectively the chance to place themselves into a physical and anticipatory space of future possibility. It would be a step into the unknown, but one imbued with a young lifetime of literally back-bending toil.

I joined Eda and Anujin in their preparations for Germany a mere ten days before our departure. Invited to observe and, indeed, participate (!) in their training, I was present for the whirlwind end of the process. Being my first taste of the scene behind the curtain, or, perhaps, behind the ring, I was struck at first by both the intimate and cooperative atmosphere of Tsomo’s school, and the unbelievable strength and focus of her teenage students. Naturally, everyone expects contortionists to be flexible, but what sets Mongolian contortionists apart is not only being the original performers of this ‘national art form’, but their raw physical power.

Somewhat masked by their youth and slight, willowy frames, Eda and Anujin’s capacity to lift themselves from one impossible position to another whether balanced on a single hand or the bodies of one another is a hallmark of the Mongolian practice. The secret to the strength of Mongolian contortionists, revealed to me fairly early on by Tsomo, as one familiar with Mongolia may not be surprised to learn. It is, of course, eating meat.

The first couple days in Germany were surprisingly difficult for the young Mongolians. Unable to really communicate in English beyond basic greetings, thrown off by their first experience of jet lag and somewhat perturbed by the popularity of the ‘vegetarian options’, the girls, normally friendly and outgoing, retreated into themselves and, more literally, into the beautiful refurbished wooden caravan in which the four of us were housed. Likewise, it came as something of a disappointment to the girls that none of their fellow competitors were ‘professional-level’ circus performers (unbeknownst to any of us, that was in fact the point of the Waldoni Circus Festival). Dreaming of a bigger circus tent than they had ever seen, walking into the festival’s modest big-top, smaller than the 74 year old circus in Ulaanbaatar where they practice, somewhat punctured their notion that this would be the spectacle that would thrust them into the international limelight.

Nevertheless, the final two nights of the festival were certainly climactic: the competition being held on the Friday evening and the gala performance the following afternoon. With a completely sold-out tent and an impressive jury of international circus stars present, the atmosphere on Friday was electric. A serenity and purposeful calm came over the girls. Their years of hard work, and their month of intensive preparation (a period far shorter than ideal, necessitated by their last-minute invitation) had built to this moment. Committed and ambitious, tonight could be the night that changed their lives’; the biggest hope of the young Mongolian contortionist, the ‘international contract’, might somehow come into their grasp: elicited from a shadowy figure in the crowd, performed into being.

The introduction by the clowns complete, the tent was plunged in darkness, the music began, and the lights came up, illuminating the girls in their opening pose and dancing off their iridescent red and blue costumes. The performance went off to a strong start, the audience dazzled into rapturous applause by even the intermediate phases of their poses. Moving fluidly from position to position, Eda and Anujin warmed into their display with megawatt smiles plastered on their elaborately made-up faces. Eda, bent back into a bridge, feet mere inches from her hands, and Anujin rested her hands on Eda’s upturned hip bones, preparing to hoist her body into a back-bending curved arc balance, when suddenly, the heroic strains of the music cut to complete silence. With barely a hesitation and remarkable professionalism, Anujin completed the pose without musical accompaniment. The silence was roundly broken by the audience’s appreciative applause, which doubled as Eda lifted her hands from the floor, leaving the pair balanced on her legs alone: a sight that truly defies one’s common sense understanding of gravity.

Despite their initial perseverance, however, the technical hitch left a lasting impact. With the music returning completely out of time with the sequence of their moves, mistakes began to creep into the dance steps that link the poses, and it was clear that their newest and most advanced pose – ‘the servee[2]‘ – might suffer. And indeed, without the absolute concentration their penultimate position required, disaster struck. As Anujin balanced on only her hands on Eda’s back, Eda’s arms suddenly gave way underneath her and she plunged face-first into the metal table with an audible crack as her chin hit the table. A wave of shock rushed through the audience, but the girls, once again recovered their composure and completed their routine with a noteworthy display of ‘zubnik’ (balancing their entire bodyweight on metal rods held in their mouths alone).

Having established that Eda had not been seriously injured in the fall, Tsomo and I left the tent for the remainder of the second half. Fighting back tears she vowed not to show the girls, Tsomo sat in the cooling twilight expressing a complex mixture of pride, frustration and disappointment at the whole experience. As the competition came to an end, the sincere condolences other performers and coaches came to offer Tsomo and the girls effected a discursive reshaping of their number: it no longer seemed to exist as a display of skill and professionalism in the face of unforeseeable circumstances, but as an unfortunate event defined by it’s lowest moment. That night in the privacy of the caravan, the girls reclaimed some of their performance through talking through the experience, re-enacting playfully the ‘pap!’ of Eda’s chin hitting the table, and laughing at the audiences gasps of shock and the sympathetic face of the stage hand that passed them their ‘zubniks’ immediately following the fall.

Happily for the girls, their gala performance (with the servee cut out) was a success. And indeed, even greater surprises were in store, as during the following prize awards ceremony it was revealed that their performance had still been enough to earn them a prize. Actually, it wasn’t until well after the end of the show that they learned exactly which prize they had won, as the entire ceremony was conducted in German. But eventually a helpful hula-hoop artist from Kiel translated their certificate revealing them to have won joint 1st prize in their age category.

 

At dawn the following morning our proud, but exhausted little group packed the table back into the CIRCUS MGL canvas bags, and with red and gold ribbons proudly uniting our luggage made our way to the airport. A number of hours later, seated at the Burger King at Moscow airport, Tsomo led a debriefing meeting to share what had been learned and what there was to be thankful for. The girls agreed that it had been something of a wake-up call to the sort of work they needed to put into the future. The level of the competition, while not professional, had been high and tested their confidence in ways they had not anticipated.

It remains to be seen whether Eda and Anujin’s performance will have been enough to truly generate future opportunities. However, a primary reason for committing to contortion is to do something highly prestigious that most young Mongolians can only dream of: to travel. And travel they certainly had. Upon our return, I noticed that their experience underwent one further discursive reformulation, being transforming into ‘a tale from abroad’. The other students eagerly gathered on the practice mats around Eda and Anujin when we returned to the old circus to hear of their adventures and the circus director arranged a series of television interviews for the girls to tell the story of their success. The fall, the level of their competitors and the festival-focus were largely erased from this version of the narrative. Instead, the glass trophy and celebratory photographs came to the fore.

With hope, I imagine that sometime in the future the girls’ experience of Germany will be wound into one further narrative, a retrospective one that traces their path to their (to-be-)current success. Perhaps recounted to a future anthropologist from the dressing room of the latest Cirque de Soleil production, it will re-weave and reorganise the lows and highs, the falls and the triumphs, reshaping then into a story that extends into a new future: the story of a career.

 

[1] I offer my sincerest thanks to Tsomo, Anujin and Eda for inviting me to accompany them on their travels, to the warm and remarkably generous members of the Waldoni Circus Projekt for allowing me to participate in the festival, to Circus Mongolia Khadgaa for letting me research with their contortion school, to the ESRC for funding my doctoral research and to all those in Mongolia and London who have made this research possible. Names have been changed. All photo credits to Tsomo Bagsh.

[2] ‘Servee’ is the Mongolian word that translates as crest, fin or flipper. In contortion, it refers to the place on the back of the neck/upper shoulders of the lower contortionist where the balancing contortionist places his/her hands.