Circus is a highly specialized performing art that demands years of relentless training. Behind a few minutes on stage lie countless hours of sweat and tears, along with the constant risk of unexpected accidents, some potentially life-threatening.

Yet circus artists continue to devote themselves to a profession that demands enormous sacrifices in health without necessarily providing financial security. For female performers, the challenges are even greater as they also navigate the responsibilities of being wives, mothers and caregivers.

VietNamNet presents a series on the women of Vietnamese circus, revealing the lives behind the spotlight that audiences rarely get to see.

Meritorious Artist Lo Thuy recalls falling more than two meters during training in Bien Hoa, Dong Nai, landing on her back and suffering herniated discs in four vertebrae.

What first brought you to the circus?

I was born and raised in Lang Son in a Nung ethnic family. When I was 11, just after finishing fifth grade, a circus school came to recruit students in my hometown. All I remember is the teachers saying I had the right qualities: straight limbs, agility and a physique suited to circus training.

I took the application home to ask my family, partly out of curiosity and partly because I wanted to challenge myself. After two months of summer training, the teachers said I showed talent, and my family agreed to let me enroll formally.

You started so young. Those five years of training must have been a tremendous challenge?

It was an extremely difficult period. At just 11, I had already left my family and had to take care of myself. Training was incredibly demanding: intensive flexibility exercises, enduring pain and practicing at high intensity every day.

Whenever we missed home, we could only go to a public telephone booth to call our families. Sometimes we even had to ask neighbors to fetch our parents so they could come to the phone. For a child, those moments felt incredibly lonely and uncertain.

There were initially five or six students from Lang Son in my class, but after five years, almost all of them had quit because they could not endure the hardship. I was the only one who stayed with the profession. Perhaps persistence, along with a little stubbornness, was what kept me going.

For the first two years, we learned fundamental skills such as acrobatics, juggling, balancing, tightrope walking and handstands. Teachers then assessed our abilities and directed us toward specialized disciplines. I was selected for aerial acrobatics, a particularly difficult discipline requiring close teamwork.

After three years, I completed my first act, trampoline-net acrobatics. But after graduation, the group broke up as everyone went in different directions. A friend of mine, who later became my husband, and I decided to stay in Hanoi and audition for the Vietnam Circus Federation, essentially starting again from scratch with a new act. It took us nearly two years, from 2009 to early 2011, before we could officially perform.

What do you remember about your first performances?

What I remember most are the tours to serve communities in remote and disadvantaged areas. Performing outdoors was difficult, while our acts demanded almost absolute precision. But seeing audiences smile and applaud, their eyes following every movement with excitement, made me incredibly happy.

Those journeys helped me grow, not only as a performer but also in how I understood the value of the work I was doing.

Circus carries considerable risks. What kind of accident have you experienced?