China’s acrobatics schools, once a ticket to the world, are struggling to survive
- In an increasingly affluent society, fewer families are sending their children to study acrobatics, as a visit to the Shenyang Acrobatic Troupe School shows
It’s 5.50am, with just a faint purple light glowing on the horizon, when a group of children aged six to 15 march diligently towards their classrooms. At 6.15am, they begin lessons in Chinese, English and maths. At 7.50am, they stop for breakfast. There’s no time to linger, students must be clean and dressed by 8.30am, when they head upstairs to two spacious rooms on the first floor of an L-shaped building near the centre of Liaoning’s provincial capital, Shenyang. Here the real training begins. This is not academics, but acrobatics.
The boys and girls prepare to bend their bodies backwards until they can hold their legs with their hands. “One, two, three!” instructs Wang Ying, 47, head of the children’s team at the Shenyang Acrobatic Troupe School.
Where many of us would feel our bones crack long before reaching the final position, these kids can hold this near-circular inversion for more than a minute. Some of the youngest students are visibly in pain, tears rolling down their cheeks, but none give up or cry openly. At most, they break the silence with a sigh of relief when the position is released.
“We teach them all kinds of techniques, but flexibility is the most important thing at this age,” Wang says. “Even after two weeks of holidays it feels like starting from scratch, like their bones are welded together.”
The next pose requires laying their chins on the ground and bending their legs back over their shoulders until their toes touch the floor just a few centimetres from their noses. It seems to defy anatomy, but it’s clearly a more comfortable contortion: some even smile and chat.
Wang watches over the group with a straight face. She is a sturdy, modern woman with the sides of her head shaved. Firm but kind, she laughs with the children and uses encouraging words rather than the martial obedience demanded by those who trained her. Although she is no Soviet-style authoritarian, Wang stresses the value of “discipline, companionship and sacrifice, which keeps puberty’s rebellious character at bay”.
