THE ART FORM
What "New Circus" Means, and Why Phare Has No Animals
Phare's acrobatics belong to a global "new circus" movement that dropped animal acts for storytelling — here's what that means for your night in Siem Reap.
See Phare dates on GetYourGuide ↗From menagerie to storytelling
For most of its history, circus meant a travelling menagerie — lion tamers, elephant acts, a ringmaster introducing one trick after another. From the 1980s, a "new circus" movement emerged internationally, pairing acrobatic skill with theatre, dance and live music to tell a continuous story instead of a string of separate acts, and dropping animal performers altogether. Canada's Cirque du Soleil is the best-known example to reach global audiences. Phare, The Cambodian Circus grew out of the same broad shift, but independently, shaped by its own founders' training and material rather than by touring the international format — part of why a Phare show feels distinctly Cambodian rather than a franchise production.
No animals, on principle and by design
Every Phare production is performed entirely by human artists — there are no animal acts of any kind, and there never have been. That fits the "new circus" model Phare belongs to, where the focus is on human skill: strength, balance, timing and years of training, rather than trained animals. It also lines up with the school's own priorities — Phare Ponleu Selpak trains people, not menageries, and its resources go into students and performers. If you're choosing an evening in Siem Reap and animal welfare in tourist entertainment matters to you, this is one of the clearer answers you'll get anywhere in the city.
Circus built like theatre
A Phare production isn't a sequence of unrelated tricks introduced by a ringmaster. Each show is built around a single original story with a beginning, middle and end, and the acrobatics, dance and live music all serve that plot rather than standing alone. A human pyramid or an aerial sequence happens because the story calls for it — a moment of triumph, tension or grief — not simply because it's an impressive trick. That structure is what most reviewers mean when they describe Phare as "theatre" as much as "circus," and it's the main reason the hour holds together as a night out rather than a variety show.
Why it works without a shared language
Because the story is carried through movement, music and expression rather than spoken dialogue, a Phare show needs no translation. Visitors who don't speak Khmer, and Cambodian audience members who don't speak English, follow the same narrative through the same physical and musical cues. That's a deliberate feature of the new-circus form Phare has adapted, not an accident — it's built to travel across language the way traditional circus always has, while still carrying a specific, local story rather than a generic one, which is part of why it works so well for a mixed, international audience.
A homegrown branch of a global form
Phare didn't import a foreign circus format and localise it — its founders built a circus school in Battambang out of art-therapy classes for young returnees, and the "new circus" style emerged from what they had to work with: bodies, music and stories, no animals or imported equipment required. The result sits in the same broad genre as companies like Cirque du Soleil, but it's a distinct, independently grown branch with Cambodian folklore, history and daily life as its raw material — which is what the rest of this show's story is really about.