Dancing across the world
It’s a twentysomething’s fantasy: Travel around the world, dance a lot and get paid to do it.
Matt Harding of Seattle made that dream come true. And he’s turning into an Internet star, thanks to a short video that’s become wildly popular on the Web.
Harding’s 3 1/2-minute video shows him dancing in dozens of countries, from China’s Great Wall to the Machu Picchu ruins in Peru. He dances amid a crowd on a busy Tokyo street, beside bemused Buddhist monks in Laos, alone on a sand dune in Namibia.
Altogether he danced and filmed his way through 39 countries during the first six months of this year.
As 29-year-old Harding is the first to admit, he’s not a great dancer. But there’s something so goofily endearing about him, as he pumps his arms and legs and grins broadly, that his video has become a huge hit. Called “Dancing 2006,” it has been viewed more than 2 million times on YouTube, a fast-growing Web site where people can share their short videos.
Harding’s dancing thing started as a lark a few years ago after he took off from his Seattle job as a video-game designer to travel.
“I’ve always done that dance, just flailing my limbs,” he says. “I used to do it to annoy my co-workers, by hovering over their desks and dancing. Then I was traveling through Vietnam with a co-worker, and he said, ‘You should do the stupid dance, and I’ll film it.’ So we did. And we just kept doing it.”
He posted his first dancing traveler video on his Web site early last year. It became so popular that the Stride gum company offered to sponsor his travels this year. In turn, the company name appears briefly on his new video.
Harding dances in time with the soundtrack, a techno-meets-African-vocals remix. He didn’t have the music when he was filming; he just snapped his fingers to keep time. He asked traveling buddies to film him while he danced. When traveling solo, he got passers-by to hold the camera.
Now Harding is back home, trolling through the thousands of e-mails and comments he’s received.
And he can walk to the Fremont Troll, the whimsical sculpture under the north end of Seattle’s Aurora Bridge that was the last shot in his video. His two young nieces joined him for that, flailing and smiling like him for the camera. The girls scampered off to climb behind the troll; Harding just kept on dancing.