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Written by ASAP
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Wednesday, 28 June 2006 |
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Four hundred years from now, they’ll dig it up from some dusty, long-lost YouTube server. They’ll filter it through conversion software and sit there, enraptured at this odd little patchwork from the distant past — three minutes and 41 seconds of a man dancing his heart out.
They’ll see him dance the very same wacky, exuberant dance in front of places and people in Peru, Jordan, Tokyo, Australia, Laos, Brunei — even in front of turtles on the Galapagos Islands and underwater in Micronesia.
And this is what they’ll say about Matt Harding, 29-year-old windmill tilter and world traveler. They’ll say he created a document of what was possible on Earth in the early 21st century.
Three years ago, Harding, a 29-year-old from Connecticut, saved up money, quit his job for a video game company in Australia and literally danced his way across the planet in front of some of its most compelling landscapes. With a handheld Canon PowerShot digital camera, he videotaped clips of himself doing it. Then he put it all together.
The miniature video he created, called “Dancing,” was set to a compelling song called “Sweet Lullaby” by Deep Forest. It shows, on a miniature and personal canvas, how big themes like globalization and technology can play out in the most individual — and whimsical — of ways.
The affair started in 2003 when Harding set to traveling around the world with the money he’d saved. Seems he’s known among his friends as dancing around when he’s bored and “antsy and ready to go to lunch.”
You should do that dance everywhere you go, a friend told Harding. He didn’t film it at first, but began doing so partway into the trip. And dance he did — on the streets of Beijing and Hanoi, Delhi and Bangkok and Moscow, even in front of the Taj Mahal.
It is a choppy affair, full of exuberance and amateur authenticity. “When I strung it together,” he says, “it became more than the sum of its parts.”
The whole thing didn’t cost as much as you’d think. Harding doesn’t like to talk numbers — “I wasn’t raised that way,” he says — but he allows that it was closer to $3,000 than $30,000.
A SPONSOR STEPS IN
He came home and posted the video on the Internet. It attracted attention — including from an advertising firm that was doing work for Cadbury Adams USA, which was launching a new product called “Stride, the Ridiculously Long Lasting Gum.”
Suddenly, Harding had an offer to recreate his trip — to do it again with more and different places included — and have it completely paid for.
The only caveat was that he’d add a title card at the end of the video crediting Stride for, as it says, “making this thing possible.”
He said yes. He returned earlier this month after six months on the global road.
Destinations this time around included Antarctica, the Shetland Islands, Guam, the Great Wall of China and a “Very Large Array” in New Mexico. He also danced on a very precarious rock formation in Norway.
The new video — “Dancing 2006” — made its debut last week on YouTube and on Harding’s own Web site, wherethehellismatt.com.
It’s funded by a corporation, and it has an ad at the end, but it’s not really an ad itself. Is it?
THE ETHICS OF
ADVERTISING
In the wrong hands or with explicit advertising — say, Harding holding up a pack of Stride gum in all those places — the whole thing could have been nothing more than tawdry.
Harding wrestled with that — particularly before he filmed himself dancing surrounded by young boys in Rwanda.
“That’s a clip that is so pure,” he says. “Because it’s Rwanda, it’s heavy. It’s layered with meaning. ...Ultimately I decided that having an image like that coming out of Rwanda when all you see is the suffering and the misery and the horror stories was important. It would do more good than harm.”
Cadbury Adams USA announced its affiliation with the video last week, saying Harding was adept at “capturing the interest and imagination of millions.”
Thus the quandary: Is it an ad or isn’t it?
Harding doesn’t think so, and he makes a compelling case.
Nowhere, he says, did the sponsors interfere with what he wanted to do.
They let him come home, put it together and post it. Their name appears only once, at the end.
It is, really, all Matt Harding — planet dancer of the early 21st century, revealing what one guy with the world at his feet and some money to spend can do to show us that the world isn’t, perhaps, quite as inaccessible a place as we might imagine.
“I thought, it was a great memento for a trip,” he says. “I didn’t think it would have the same effect on other people that it had on me.” | Only registered users can write comments.
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