Who the Hell Is Matt Harding?

Posted on 13. Apr, 2009 by Kerry Banks in People, Videos

The Internet has created a number of oddball celebrities, but none stranger than Matt Harding, a self-confessed 32-year-old slacker and video game designer from Westport, Connecticut. Harding’s claim to fame is a goofy dance he performs in front of various landmarks and locations around the globe. Let’s be perfectly clear: Harding is not a talented dancer. Imagine a big, hefty fellow in shorts and hiking boots bouncing around with his arms and knees pumping awkwardly. Yet somehow, his flailing chicken-step has earned him major TV coverage. Harding has appeared on The Ellen Degeneres Show, Jimmy Kimmel Live, The Daily Show and Inside Edition, to name but a few, and he has been profiled by the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post.

The bizarre dance craze originated completely by accident. In 2003, Harding had just quit his job as a video game designer and was backpacking around Southeast Asia with some friends. One day in Vietnam they were videotaping each other when one of his companions suggested he do his “geeky dance.” Harding continued to do the jig in various Southeast Asian countries that he visited on the trip. The videos were uploaded to his website for friends and family to enjoy. Later, Harding edited together 15 dance scenes, all with him in centre frame, and added some background music–a world music song entitled Sweet Lullaby by Deep Forest. Harding first posted himself online in January 2005. The video was passed around by e-mail and by various bloggers and eventually became viral, with his server getting 20,000 or more hits a day as it was discovered. “It got picked up by somethingawful.com and sites like that,” Harding recalled. “Usually, what they showed was people getting hurt or doing something really stupid, so I was bracing myself for abuse, but everyone seemed to like it.”

Bemused by his antics and impressed by the following he was amassing, the makers of Stride Gum contacted Harding and asked him if he would be interested in making another video for them for the debut of their chewing gum, which was slated for June 2006. With Stride’s sponsorship money, Harding journeyed to 39 countries on seven continents, including Antarctica, Egypt, Italy, Turkey and Easter Island, stopping to film himself busting a move at each destination. From these wanderings, he created a second video called “Dancing 2006.”

In an interview with the Washington Post, Harding admitted that the most difficult dance he did took place on the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. “I spent nine hours climbing up to the peak, I vomited eight times on the way up and I just had nothing left by the time I got up there.” The most complicated video was shot underwater in Micronesia in front of the propeller of a Japanese shipwreck that was sunk in World War II. The most terrifying two-step was on the Kjeragbolten rock in Norway. “It’s just a tiny rock wedged between two faces of a chasm 3,000 feet up and only a few feet across. Dancing on that rock, yeah, I came very close to killing myself.”

Although there is no discernable connection between chewing gum and bad dancing, Stride offered to sponsor Harding strutting his stuff around the world again in 2007 and 2008. Amazingly, in this era of shameless commercial tie-ins, he was not obliged to wear a Stride T-shirt or deliver a little pitch for the product. Harding released his third dancing video on June 20, 2008, the product of 14 months of travelling in 42 countries. In his early videos, Harding dances alone, but in his third video he is usually in the company of others: South African street children in Soweto, painted tribesman in New Guinea, Bollywood dancers in India, waitresses clad in French maid costumes in Tokyo, all copying, or trying to, his spastic gyrations. Harding’s girlfriend, Melissa Nixon, helped to produce the video. Nixon organized the 40 or so dancing events, culled from a list of more than 20,000 invitations from fans around the world to come boogie with them in their hometowns. The esoteric background music, a piece called ”Praan,” was composed by Gary Schyman specifically for the video. The vocals were supplied by a 17-year-old Bengali singer named Palbasha Siddique, with lyrics adapted from the poem “Stream of Life,” by Rabindranath Tagore.

Today, Harding estimates that his online dance videos, which appear on YouTube, Google Video, Vimeo and on his own website: www.wherethehellismatt.com, have been viewed more than 20 million times. The miracle of Internet fame has transformed his life. Harding was recently recruited by Visa to star in its “Travel Happy” advertising campaign, and has hired a publicist to help him field interview requests. He is also in demand as a public speaker, an amazing development considering he never utters a word in any of his videos. As for the message he hopes to convey through his globe-stomping antics, Harding says: “A wildly exaggerated view of the natural joyfulness and goodwill of our species. I make humanist propaganda. I try to trick people into thinking the world is wonderful so they will act accordingly.”