Romanian New Year Bear Dance

December 30, 2015 7:59 PM

"To outsiders, the sight of a troupe of dancing bears, decked out in blood-red tassels, stomping through the snowy streets of a small Romanian town might be a strange, almost sinister sight."
posted by moonmilk (13 comments total)

Hey, if it keeps the vampires away...
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 8:04 PM on December 30, 2015

On the other hand, it's probably pretty crap defense against the werebears.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 8:17 PM on December 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

Also against flatbears.
[that page is SFW but the rest of the site is N]
posted by moonmilk at 8:32 PM on December 30, 2015 [2 favorites]

They can dance if they want to. They can leave other bears behind. 'Cause if your bears don't dance and if they don't dance, well, they're not bears of mine.
posted by SPrintF at 9:38 PM on December 30, 2015 [13 favorites]

One of my crew for the LA Krampuslauf dressed as one the bears, I made the huge red tassels out of a half hank of yarn each.
posted by boilermonster at 11:07 PM on December 30, 2015

Some time in my freshman year of university at UBC, I was in The Pendulum café in the Student Union Building (located next to the student bar called The Pit, natch). At the time, they had a large, bland painting of some bears in the forest.

In the middle of some conversation, my Russian friend looked up and commented, in a very stereotypical but completely unaffected accent, "In Russia, the bears, they dance."

Apparently not just Russia, Karin, but thanks for the heads-up.
posted by wakannai at 12:28 AM on December 31, 2015 [2 favorites]

I was rolling on the floor watching the video, because everybody's super into it and then it cuts to that girl at the end and she's like "okay are we done yet?"
posted by Krazor at 5:02 AM on December 31, 2015 [1 favorite]

I was expecting real bears.
posted by newpotato at 5:11 AM on December 31, 2015 [3 favorites]

Pretty sure there is a zebra crossing under these bears
posted by inthe80s at 5:13 AM on December 31, 2015

"To outsiders, the sight of a troupe of dancing bears, decked out in blood-red tassels, stomping through the snowy streets of a small Romanian town might be a strange, almost sinister sight."

"IT'S A BEAR DANCE!!!"
posted by Doktor Zed at 5:16 AM on December 31, 2015

As it notes in the CNN story, there is a bit of an unseemly race/class aspect to this, as the activity is of Roma origins, but the ban on hunting bears to create new costumes has sent the prices on existing costumes skyrocketing. So now you have the weird reality of Roma people--who are often openly loathed in Romania--watching from the sidelines as people who largely wouldn't deign to speak to them don their traditional costumes and perform their traditional dance for crowds and cameras.

Still an awesome thing to behold, but as with so much in this world, you don't have to scratch too hard to find an angle of it that is terrible.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 7:00 AM on December 31, 2015 [2 favorites]

See also the holy-shit-badass-as-all-get-out Busójárás festival in Hungary, where revellers don demonic masks and animal pelts and try to scare away winter.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 7:02 AM on December 31, 2015 [1 favorite]

Everybody knows you don't scare winter away.

You fuck it away. (absolutely NSFW)


Just as an aside, I like to believe that Oglaf and Dragon Age take place in the same universe; so that while my Inquisitor is busy closing rifts, somewhere else in Thedas, there is a sexy dungeon, or Sithrak cultists going door-to-door, or a guy jamming a ring up his ass because an oracle told him to.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 8:48 AM on December 31, 2015