Grizzly Bear

The tradition & historical record

The pas de l'ours, first known by its English name grizzly bear, is a couple dance that emerged in the United States around 1910 and achieved international popularity until the outbreak of the First World War. Its name refers to a stylized and parodic imitation of the swaying gait of a grizzly bear, as well as to the close embrace of the dancers and movements likened to the animal's paws. Performed to ragtime music, the pas de l'ours belongs to a group of early 20th-century American animal dances that shared a taste for fantasy and marked a departure from established social dance conventions. Characterized by syncopated movements, improvisation, and a playful tone, the dance quickly attracted a wide audience. At the same time, it provoked controversy: critics associated its movements with moral laxity, viewed animal imitation as a form of regression, and, in some cases, called for restrictions or bans on public performances. Such reactions were often reinforced by claims that the dance originated in African American communities of the San Francisco underworld. As a result, the pas de l'ours was frequently described as vulgar, a label that sometimes carried racial connotations. From 1911 onward, several songs by Irving Berlin, notably The Dance of the Grizzly Bear and Everybody's Doin' It Now, played a significant role in popularizing the dance. ¹

The grizzly bear was one of several dances practiced in the United States between about 1910 and 1913 to ragtime music, a term that originally referred to "ragged time". These dances belonged to the category of closed-couple dances, in which partners remained in physical contact, holding one another with both hands or arms. Ragtime is characterized by syncopation, displaced accents, and rhythmic shifts set against a steady bass pattern. This rhythmic structure influenced the dances performed to it, which were generally based on walking steps that allowed for numerous variations. Dancers could play with the musical structure through foot placement and bodily accents, modify their speed of execution while moving, or introduce visible contrasts to the regular bass line through movements of the arms, shoulders, and hips. The emergence of ragtime dances followed the diffusion of ragtime music beyond African American communities during the first decade of the 20th century, particularly into venues associated with popular entertainment and nightlife. This spread was accelerated by music hall performances, including minstrel shows. Reconstructing ragtime dances as they were originally practiced by popular audiences is difficult. Rather than existing as a single fixed or authentic form, these dances were generally spontaneous, evolving, and informal, marked by playfulness and by early hybridization that combined elements of African American cultural practices with influences from European traditions. Dance terminology was not standardized during this period. A step referred to as the grizzly bear in one city might be called the turkey trot or bunny hug in another, with these terms sometimes used interchangeably for the one-step. An article published in the St. ¹

The grizzly bear and other ragtime dance steps popular in the United States in the years preceding the country's entry into the First World War are commonly grouped under the label animal dances, a term derived from the animal names assigned to them. This group includes dances such as the turkey trot, the bunny hug, the monkey glide, the horse trot, the crab step, the possum trot, the bullfrog hop, the fish walk, the snake dip, the eagle rock, the chicken scratch, the kangaroo kant, and the wiggle worm. The breadth of this repertoire has been described as a "zoo", reflecting both the popularity of such dances and the rapid turnover of fashionable steps presented as new variations. The animal-based names primarily reflect the imitative and playful qualities of the dances. In the case of the grizzly bear, this imitation involved movements associated with a bear, including pronounced lateral swaying, bent knees, a close embrace with partners positioned chest to chest and arms resting loosely on one another's shoulders, and the curling of the fingers to suggest claws. Many historians interpret the emergence of the grizzly bear and animal dances more generally as the outcome of a dual process of hybridization. On the one hand, changes in African American social practices associated with urbanization, migration to the Northeastern United States, and the transformation of leisure venues contributed to shifts in dance style, including a more upright posture, abandonment of barefoot dancing, increased individualization of movement, and heightened sexual connotations of gestures. ¹

Several authors, following Kathy Peiss, situate animal dances in general, and the grizzly bear in particular, within broader changes in social dancing practices in the United States from the late 19th century onward. These changes accompanied the rise of a culture of dance halls (dance-hall), which offered young wage-earning women new opportunities for social interaction outside family and neighborhood networks and contributed to evolving attitudes toward leisure, sexuality, and personal fulfillment. These new forms of entertainment, less constrained by kinship ties and traditional supervision, were encouraged by the spread of collective housing (tenements) and by the emergence of rackets, clubs or amusement societies operated for profit through alcohol sales and characterized by limited oversight of admissions. Their popularity led to the multiplication of increasingly large dance halls, which often functioned as dance academies during the day and hosted social events in the evenings and on Sundays. Unlike earlier social settings, these venues did not promote intergenerational mixing and instead relied on instructors who demonstrated the latest fashionable steps. The expansion of such dance halls, where young women of modest means were admitted at reduced prices and where comparatively relaxed moral codes prevailed, was viewed with concern by observers from higher social classes. Within a broader media climate marked by anxiety over the so-called white slavery, these venues were often portrayed as encouraging prostitution. ¹

In 1910, the composer George Botsford published the Grizzly Bear Rag. His publisher, Ted Snyder, subsequently asked Irving Berlin to write lyrics for a vocal version, which involved only minor melodic modifications. The resulting song, entitled The Dance of the Grizzly Bear, was issued in sheet-music form alongside the original piano-only composition. The vocal version achieved substantial commercial success, reportedly selling around one million copies. Its popularity contributed to the rapid dissemination of the dance itself. The lyrics, which humorously evoke the intense excitement generated by the grizzly bear, attest to the notoriety of the dance at an early stage. ¹

The popularity of Irving Berli… ¹

The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Grizzly Bear (dance)”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence. ¹

Grizzly Bear is early 20th-century dance style, according to the structured record cited below. This entry was generated automatically from that record and has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition. ²

The source record links this tradition to 1 external register, which can be verified through the citation. ²