ANSAN, South Korea (AP) — 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 country, wowing audiences with then exotic animals like an elephant and a giraffe and a variety of shows including skits, comic talks, singing, dancing and magic shows. At its peak years, it had more than 200 artists, acrobats and other staff, according to Park.

Like in many other countries, TVs and movies later syphoned off the audiences of Dongchoon and other circuses in South Korea. Their actors, singers and comedians moved to TV stations, and some became bigger stars. The advent of the internet, video games and professional sports were another blow. South Korean circuses also dropped animal shows that faced protests by animal rights campaigners.

Now, Dongchoon is the only circus in South Korea after all its rivals went out of business.

How Dongchoon survives

Park, who joined Dongchoon in 1963, served as a show host and sometimes sang and acted in the circus’s drama programs. He left the circus in 1973 and ran a lucrative supermarket business. In 1978, he returned to the circus industry by taking over Dongchoon, which was put up for sale after devastating typhoon damage.

Park, now 80, said he worried Dongchoon could disappear into history after seeing newspaper reports that its assets would be split into parts and sold.

“I thought Dongchoon must not disappear. When we want to study the roots of our country’s dramas, we should look back on the traces of Dongchoon. The same goes for the history of our other shows, traditional music performances and magic shows as well as circuses themselves,” Park said.

Heo Jeong Joo, an expert at the All That Heritage Research Institute, also values highly the legacy of Dongchoon, which she said incorporated many traditional performers and artists who operated before its 1925 founding.

“Its foundation exceeds 100 years. In a historical perspective, I think it should be designated as an intangible cultural asset,” Heo said.

Park said he almost closed the circus in 2009 after his shows drew only 10-20 spectators each for several months during a widespread flu outbreak. It survived after local media reports sympathizing with the plight of Dongchoon prompted many people to flock and fully pack shows for weeks, he said.

Dongchoon leaps again at its seaside big top

Since 2011, Dongchoon has been performing at a big top at a seaside tourist area in Ansan, just south of Seoul. Its circus workers also frequently travel to other areas for temporary shows. Dongchoon officials said their business is doing relatively well, drawing several hundred spectators on weekdays and up to 2,000 on weekends at Ansan alone.

Ansan official Sharon Ham said local tourism has been boosted by Dongchoon’s presence. She said Dongchoon shows are popular with both older generations wanting to recall childhood memories of circuses and younger generations seeking something new.

“It was a very impressive and meaningful circus,” Sim Chung-yong, a 61-year-old spectator, said after one show last week. “But I also thought about how much big pains and hardships those circus acrobats underwent to perform like this.”

Dongchoon officials say they now offer only acrobatic performances and refrain from too-risky acts because many people don’t like them any longer.

Its all 35 acrobats are now Chinese, as a circus job is generally shunned by more affluent South Koreans who consider it too dangerous and low-paying. Park said he bought land at Ansan where he hopes to build a circus school to nurture South Korean circus artists.

Xing Jiangtao, 37, has been working for Dongchoon since 2002 — initially as an acrobat and now as its performance director. He recalled that when he first came to South Korea, he and his Chinese colleagues all worked as assistants to Dongchoon’s 50 South Korean acrobats but they’ve all left one by one.

“Now, it’s the only circus in South Korea, and I hope we will create good circus performances to show to spectators so that we can help Dongchoon exist for another 100 years,” Xing said in fluent Korean.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Chair yoga modifies traditional yoga poses to suit older adults and those with physical limitations. But as AP Lifestyles Writer Leanne Italie explains, that doesn’t mean it’s any less of a workout. As older adults embrace active lifestyles, chair yoga has surged in popularity.

In this episode of “The Story Behind the AP Story,” Italie explains the origins of chair yoga, its benefits and how it works.

Haya Panjwani, host: Hi, I’m Haya Panjwani, and I’m the host of “The Story Behind the AP Story.” Today we’re joined by Leanne Italie, a lifestyles reporter for The Associated Press. Hi, Leanne. How are you doing?

Leanne Italie, AP lifestyles reporter: I’m great. How are you?

PANJWANI: I’m great. Thank you for asking. Today we’re going to talk about chair yoga. What is it?

ITALIE: Yeah, sure, so chair yoga has a really sort of interesting and important history. Traditional yoga done on the floor on mats is over 5,000 years old, but chair yoga is a relatively new offshoot.

In 1982, a yoga instructor named Lakshmi Voelker noticed that a student of hers in a traditional yoga class who was in her 30s and suffered from arthritis was having trouble getting down on the floor. So, Voelker decided to adapt some poses for use in a chair. And she has since sort of become the guru of chair yoga, and she has written, since co-written a book about it.

Chair yoga has really gone a long way in boosting the accessibility of yoga itself to many age groups, including older people and people who have physical limitations.

PANJWANI: Are there any communities that benefit from chair yoga in particular?

ITALIE: Absolutely. I mean, chair yoga is great for anybody who wants a gentle workout, but it’s not easy, and there are many, many benefits. So, obviously, it has a lot to offer older people, particularly older women who are prone to osteoporosis, and it’s a gentle and safe way to improve your flexibility, your strength and your balance. It helps minimize the risk of falls and fractures.

There’s not a body part that it really doesn’t help. It helps the spine, the hips, the legs, all engaged. It also helps your core, helps you strengthen your core and your back, and it can help manage stiffness and pain associated with a lot of conditions, including arthritis and osteoporosis. It’s not difficult to adapt traditional yoga poses for a chair, which I found kind of surprising, because, you know, yoga looks so daunting sometimes, and there are so many — there’s a spiritual aspect to yoga that a lot of people don’t realize, you know, in the West. You know, in addition to all the physical benefits, you know, there are relaxation benefits there’s, you know, stress management benefits, like from the breathing and the mindfulness aspect of yoga. So, all of that can be adapted to a chair as well.

PANJWANI: How is chair yoga linked to better well-being or fall prevention?

ITALIE: Yeah, I mean, while there’s a lot of research on regular traditional yoga, there is some research that breaks out chair yoga in particular. One study from 2012 found that 15 minutes of chair yoga significantly improves physical and psychological markers for stress. And then another study in the April 2023 journal Healthcare indicates that chair yoga went a long way to counter knee osteoarthritis in women 65 and older. There are other benefits, too, like for instance, office workers who spend a lot of time hunched over screens can just do chair yoga right there in their chair at their desks, and that can really improve posture.

PANJWANI: Your story talks about the divide between men and women who do yoga. Why is that?

ITALIE: I find this really, really interesting, and in the story that we did on chair yoga, we asked some longtime yoga participants, practitioners, what they thought — some women in their 70s and their 80s who’ve been doing yoga for 40, 50 years, why are there not more men in your classes? And they said, well, there’s no one definitive answer here, and there’s no way to avoid a massive generalization on who men are as a group. But, you know, so you do get different answers depending on who you ask. But, data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention do show that women are more than twice as likely as men to practice yoga.

You know, ancient yoga over the many thousands of years was exclusively reserved for men. And then it became popular in Western culture in the 1960s and ’70s as part of sort of the hippie counterculture movement and the New Age movement. And marketing started to skew to women in the ’80s and ’90s. And that sort of was an outgrowth of the growing fitness industry in the West and the rise of workouts like on VHS tapes and DVDs that people could do at home.

PANJWANI: Thank you for listening to “The Story Behind the AP Story.” To listen to previous episodes, visit apnews.com.

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Ian Andersen was biking through Iran last week when Israel launched strikes on Iranian nuclear sites and the country’s military leaders, drawing Tehran’s swift response with barrages of missiles.

The 32-year-old from Minnetonka, Minnesota, said he did not expect to get caught up in what looked like a real war zone. He fled to neighboring Azerbaijan on Monday.

“The bombs started falling,” Andersen said Wednesday, speaking to The Associated Press over Zoom from a hotel in Baku, Azerbaijan’s capital. “It was extremely scary.”

Andersen was on a yearslong, personal mission to cycle across all seven continents. He had been touring Iran with a local guide, which is a must for U.S. visitors to Iran, and sharing videos of his journey with tens of thousands of his social media followers since the beginning of the month.

On Friday — “the day the bombs started falling” — they were on the road from the town of Chalus, on Iran’s Caspian Sea coast, driving south to the capital of Tehran, where Andersen hoped to apply for a visa to Afghanistan, with the goal of crossing into Central Asia and eventually Russia.

“It was really just, like, the worst timing possible,” Andersen said.

They sheltered in place and decided to speak Spanish so no one would suspect Andersen’s American identity. He saw long lines of cars on the road fleeing Tehran. Family, friends and social media followers were worried for him.

Eventually, the U.S. State Department sent Andersen an email advising him to leave for Azerbaijan or Turkey. With his VPN blocked, a friend in Los Angeles applied for an Azerbaijani visa on his behalf, which was granted with emergency approval from the U.S. Embassy in Baku.

Andersen said the circumstances made him abort his biking plan — at least for now. To have kept going would have been “a little nutty,” he said.

“I was crazy for going in there in some people’s eyes in the first place,” Andersen said. “And then getting out I think was the safe, smart choice at that point.”

For now, his plans are up in the air as he considers what to do next. Some time ago, he’d traded his job back home, working as a project manager at a construction company, to bike the world.

Biking was his dream, his escape, Andersen said, adding that he had struggled in the past with addiction and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

“Maybe I was a bit naive,” he said but added that he doesn’t regret the trip.

He has had dangerous moments before, recounting how in 2023 in northern Kenya, a tribesman threatened to throw a spear at him while he was biking through a rural area.

“There’s always going to be a risk, and you have to accept it,” he said.

Andersen said he plans to take a ferry across the Caspian Sea to Kazakhstan, and then bike east into Uzbekistan.

“But I don’t know where to go from there,” he said.