Dancing Bears

Published in

Ercigoj Art Embroidery

3 min readMar 5, 2019

Beautiful capture of the contrast between tragic history and a happier ending

We used the finest subtle colour gradations to create three-dimensional bears of seemingly simple contours and added the blue and red reflections from the disco ball, perfectly aligned in 3D space with their different sharpness levels, transparency and brightness. Bears come to life through their eyes, embroidered with golden thread in order to create perfect contrast with the background — when the lights are off, one can only see disco ball reflections and eyes shining from the dark. The 3D space is completed with the disco ball on top, meticulously embroidered with many hues of golden threads ranging from dark gold greens to bright yellows and all the way to dark reds. Each section of the disco ball is embroidered in a different direction of stitches, which creates an illusion of the disco ball reflecting light from each mirror piece independently as an observer moves from left to right.

About motif

Dancing bears were once seen anywhere in the Eastern Europe countryside, in travelling circuses and tourist resorts. In the nineties, animal welfare organizations began exposing the truth behind this tradition, being that bears have been trained to “dance” on hot plates. Once retired, the remaining dancing bears were placed in special nature reserves but never lost the habit of shuffling their feet.

Dancing Bears, the embroidered art installation, juxtaposes their tragic history and lighter side of bears, happily dancing in freedom. The form of a disco party allows bears to express unique styles while upholding their common heritage.

In the embroidered art installation, original embroidery piece Dancing Bears is complemented with a hardwood musical cabinet, depicting an embroidered DJ Bear on the cabinet doors, high fidelity speakers with embroidered dust covers and unique music featured on a vinyl LP in a unique embroidered case. The music piece was written specifically for the project, incorporating into dramatic music themes of bears and embroidery machine sounds as the rhythm base.