Stories

The Boston Globe

July 30, 2006

By Keith O'Brien

In late 2004, Matt Harding was 28, broke, and unemployed in Seattle, with no prospects and no real desire to work. A video game developer once passionate about the industry, he was bored and adrift, interested only in traveling.

And dancing.

And videotaping himself doing both.

In the previous year and a half, traveling on a shoestring, Harding had blown his savings hopping across the globe from Prague to Palau, London to Los Angeles. And almost everywhere he went, he taped himself dancing the same silly dance, each place, every time. It was his thing; whenever he felt nervous or antsy, Harding had always done this awkward little jig.

The dance had never been more than an odd habit, but now it was becoming something new. With way too much time on his hands, Harding turned his travel video clips into a polished montage that he posted on his website in early 2005. And that's when it happened: Matt Harding became an Internet sensation.

This summer alone, millions of people have watched the video from Harding's latest trip. But the most incredible thing about it is not the Internet buzz. It's how Harding turned a goofy dance into the journey of a lifetime.

"The video has changed my life," Harding said last week. "The traveling has changed the way I look at it, changed the way I approach it. I think a lot of people tend to sort of put themselves in cages. The trick was getting out of the cage and realizing nobody had put me in it."

Harding grew up in Westport, Conn., the youngest of three children. He was not good in school, but he was good at video games. When he graduated from high school in 1994, he didn't go to college like his sisters. He went to work at a local video game store and soon he was editor of a video game magazine.

Thus began nearly a decade of following jobs from Los Angeles to Brisbane, Australia. There, Harding says, he did well, coming up with the idea for the popular video game "Destroy All Humans." He wasn't happy, though, and in February 2003, he did what most twentysomethings only dream of: He quit his job and began a six-month trip back to the States.

"I was utterly rootless," he said in a telephone interview from Seattle. "I had cut all my roots in Australia. I had no roots left in the US. I had nowhere where I lived, and not a lot of possessions, and it was really a fantastic feeling."

It was also an unusual feeling for Harding, who had been raised primarily on Disney World vacations. This sort of travel simply didn't seem possible to him. "It just wasn't on the radar," he said, "as something I could do." But Harding wound up in Vietnam and at the urging of a friend named Brad, he did it.

Harding danced.

"It was just something I'd always done," he said, "and for Brad, it was the thing I did at work to annoy him when it was time to go to lunch. I would sort of hover over his desk and say, `C'mon, get up, it's time to go to lunch.' It's something I do when I get antsy."

Set to the club anthem "Sweet Lullaby" by Deep Forest, the dance is not exactly pretty. It's something in between a tap dance and a seizure, all elbows and knees, feet marching in place. But Melissa Nixon, Harding's ex-girlfriend, says that's the beauty of it. It's not self-conscious or scripted. "It's pure joy," she said, "and it's childlike. The dance is such a huge, honest expression of his joy."

At first, Harding didn't think much of his dance in Vietnam. But he continued to dance throughout the 2003 trip: in Mongolia and Myanmar, at the Taj Mahal and in Red Square. Two months in Africa in 2004 gave Harding still more footage and then unemployed and living in Seattle he spent hours compiling a montage that he set to music and posted online in January 2005.

"It was a dark time for Matt," Nixon recalled. "Winter in Seattle is a hard thing. You don't get the fun of snow. It's just gray, and it's rainy, and it goes on and on and on and on."

Harding, again, didn't think much of the video. His website, and anything he posted there, had always been for friends, not anyone else. But on Jan. 17, 2005, someone posted a link to his video on a Seattle blog.

"Stop whatever you're doing," the posting said, "and go watch this awesome dancing video."

And that was it.

People got hooked on the video. It made people smile, want to dance, and want to travel. "I MUST FIND MATT and I MUST SEE HIM DANCE," wrote one person who saw the video in cyberspace. "I. Love. This," wrote another. MSNBC called. Then Ellen DeGeneres. He got his own Wikipedia link and then the offer of a lifetime: Would he travel for six months and do a video for a new chewing gum called Stride?

"Will you be paying for this?" Harding asked.

Stride answered that it would. An epic journey to 39 countries followed, starting in January. Lynne Vandever, Stride's marketing director, says the video received 2 million hits shortly after Stride launched last month. Harding made the perfect company spokesman, she says, by just dancing.

"He's bold and irreverent," Vandever said. "You can tell a lot about a person by the company they keep, and we thought Matt would be good company to keep for our brand."

When he is asked now what he does for a living, Harding says he is a spokesman for a chewing gum company. "Which is a strange enough answer," he added, "that it inevitably leads to a more elaborate answer."

If you're lucky, maybe then he will tell you about the time he swam with jellyfish in Palau, or with whale sharks in the Seychelles, or with the ghosts of Japanese sailors in a sunken World War II submarine near Micronesia.

Or maybe about singing "Come Together" at a brothel/karaoke bar in Mandalay. Or getting a flat tire in Namibia. Or nearly getting arrested in Greece for dancing at the Parthenon.

Or maybe he will tell you about Rwanda. He flew there in April on a whim and stayed just long enough to shoot his favorite video clip of all.

In it, Harding is surrounded by children, who did not speak English and had not the slightest clue why he was there. But the Rwandan children saw him dancing and they knew exactly what to do.

They started dancing, too.

Contact Keith O'Brien, a freelance writer in Boston, at keith@keithob.com.