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If it’s easy to see why audiences still attend circuses, it’s a little more difficult to fathom what kind of person would choose to devote him- or herself to this way of life. Besides the toll the circus takes on a person’s body, there’s also the lack of continuity the lifestyle imposes. Each year, the Big Apple has a 75 percent turnover among its employees. The show is never in one place for more than a month or two at a time. Yet circus people say over and over that they couldn’t imagine themselves in any other situation. As one Big Apple employee puts it, "I’ve thought about doing other things, but this is where my heart keeps leading me."

For most of us, circus folk are essentially and irredeemably other. When the Big Top comes to town, even in a cosmopolitan city like Boston, we are aware that strangers are among us, an insular, rootless community of people who speak strange languages and perform strange feats, who share caravans with performing dogs, who marry each other and raise their families on the road, the next generation of jugglers and barkers. And while there is a part of us that envies this weird nomadic existence, or at least the freedom it represents, there is also a part of us that distrusts it.

Traditionally, the circus has attracted society’s misfits, people who, for whatever reason, feel the need to run away — people who may have something to hide. This, too, is what keeps us going back for more. In the foreword to the new anthology Step Right Up: Stories of Carnivals, Sideshows, and the Circus (Carroll & Graf), editor Nathaniel Knaebel suggests that there is something "not quite right" about circus people, adding, "and it is as much this festering peculiarness that draws us to the midway as it is a tightrope act or the chance to win a plush rabbit." In one story in the book, Angela Carter explores the dark side of clowns. "What beastly, obscene violence they mimed!" she writes. "Dance of disintegration; and of regression; celebration of the primal slime."

Step Right Up is infused with a looming sense of desolation. One of the more macabre pieces, this one nonfiction, recounts the story of a sideshow oddity named Grady Stiles, a/k/a Lobster Boy, a tale rife with alcoholism, domestic abuse, and ultimately murder. The grim circumstances surrounding this raging, self-loathing circus freak and his unfortunate family lend an added twist to Paul Binder’s assertion that the circus represents the "wide extremes of the heart."

But things are different now. The days when circus-goers paid a little extra to gawk at the Bearded Lady or the African Savage, of course, are over. The sideshow freak has given way to X-Men; multiculturalism has supplanted morbid cultural curiosity. These days, circuses like the Big Apple (a not-for-profit organization) stress charitable work over turning a profit, proficiency over oddity, inclusion over alienation. Today’s performer, as Binder points out, sets out to inspire as much as to stupefy. "The circus has a way of making us connect with the self as a human being," he says. "It’s about making contact with the audience, not being far out. These are people just like you and me. They’re not strange creatures or superheroes."

At first glance, there is nothing extraordinary about Alesya Goulevich. A 26-year-old performer from Belarus, Goulevich is pretty enough, and her English is okay. Sitting in the stands before a performance, she expresses her attraction to the circus a little diffidently, a little falteringly. "I’ve always loved it," she says, "the life, traveling, performing." She goes on to explain how her mother, an aerial gymnast, insisted that she choose an act that would allow her to keep her feet on the ground. Today, Goulevich dances with hula-hoops, 50 at a time, which is not quite as risk-free as it may seem. "It’s safer than the flying trapeze," she says, "but you never know. I work in high heels, so I could break my leg."

If Goulevich is somewhat unremarkable in person, when she enters the ring she is transformed. The shimmering hoops cascade up and down her undulating torso in a way that is both technically impressive and jaw-droppingly sexy. She certainly seems a far cry from the woman who, earlier, responded to questions about her upcoming attempt to break the world record for most hula-hoops spun simultaneously (83) by explaining that "yes," she is nervous about the attempt and "yes," she is confident she will succeed. As Binder puts it, his employees are "ordinary people who do extraordinary things."

The circus has changed, but not necessarily for the better. As Knaebel points out, the grunginess and weirdness of the old-time circus was part of its appeal. In any event, despite the success of the Big Apple, circuses don’t enjoy nearly the popularity they used to. In the late 1800s, thanks to the efforts of media-savvy showmen like P.T. Barnum, the circus generated the kind of buzz that we now associate with the movie and music industries. Indeed, in an age when entertainment was very often restricted, at best, to mother’s plinking on the family piano, the pageantry and vibrancy of the Big Top whipped people into a frenzy.

By the time of World War II, however, interest in the form had started to wane. "By the ’40s, the circus was over in America," says the Circus Historical Society’s Al Stencell. "It limped on." But it didn’t die. Today, circus owners are trying to find a way to bring their shows into the 21st century without abandoning the conventions that make the circus what it is. At the two extremes of this enterprise, you have performance-arty shows like Cirque du Soleil and doggedly traditional shows like Ringling Bros., with the Big Apple falling somewhere between. Where this will lead the circus in the future, no one seems to know. "I think it will survive," says Stencell, "but in a different form."

There certainly aren’t the sheer numbers of circuses that there once were. In the mid-19th century, the state of Wisconsin alone was home to two dozen circuses and more than 100 smaller tent shows. Today, the entire country has about a dozen circuses operating, and maybe 40 tent shows.

For the most part, you can chalk up this decline to sports arenas, movie houses, video arcades, and HBO. Today, despite people’s willingness to go to the circus out of nostalgia or curiosity, the Big Top is no longer an established, core form of entertainment in this country. This fact, coupled with rising insurance rates, the bureaucracy involved in securing performance permits, and pressure from animal-rights groups, means that Binder and his fellow showmen will have plenty of struggles to come. Stencell puts it a little more bluntly: "To be a circus owner, you’ve got to be crazy."

Perhaps the biggest problem facing the circus industry now — or at least a problem it will face down the road — is the issue of personnel. This year, the majority of the Big Apple’s performers hail from abroad — Latvia, Colombia, Cuba, Russia. While this fact may add to the aura of exoticism that surrounds the circus, it also suggests that the tradition of home-bred circus dynasties, in which a single family might produce eight generations of performers, has waned. "People today don’t want to work that hard," says Stencell. "People want instant careers. They can take a 14-week course and come out as an electrician. This can take you most of your life to learn. No one has the patience."