“And do a Grizzly”: Djuna Barnes and Dancing Animals in the New York Press

Abstract

The “Grizzly Bear” animal dance sparked the social dance craze that swept the United States in the 1910s, causing a moral panic about the unseemly movements and erotic energies of this new popular leisure form. Djuna Barnes’s New York journalism on dance serves to connect these animal dances to the “eruption of animality in artistic and cultural texts” that Carrie Rohman has traced in modernism. Exploring social dance, Irene Castle’s career, and Barnes’s journalism, this article examines assemblages of bears and other dancing (human and nonhuman) animals to foreground the intersection of modernist animal ontologies with elusive histories of social dance.