The dance Matt Harding does might be described as the Much Less Funky Chicken, with the chicken running in place and its wings trying to signal something — perhaps distress — in the semaphore alphabet.
But it is one of the most famous dances on the Internet, at minimum, and it is more affecting, both for its happy simplicity and its astonishing back story, than any tango, waltz or rumba.
Harding, 30, has brought his exuberant, little-boy-needing-the-bathroom shuffle to dozens of countries and millions of computer screens. Performed at global hot spots (Jordan) and cold ones (Antarctica), it serves as the connective tissue in Harding’s quintessentially viral travel videos and suggests to all who watch them that Harding is an unassuming, comfortable-in-his-skin, rhythmically agnostic guy.
“It’s literally just flailing my limbs. Step up and down and flail my arms,” the Seattle resident, a sometime video game designer, said of his technique. “Have you ever seen a 2-year-old dancing when all they can muster is just the step back and forth?”
In the two existing videos, found on YouTube, at Harding’s own Where the Hell is Matt site, or, in all likelihood, in your e-mail inbox in the last couple of years, he does the dance in the foreground, the ethereal soundtrack music plays and, as the scene shifts to a new locale, the letters on-screen tell you exactly where Harding is at that moment.
The thing almost everybody who sees the videos will tell you is they make you want to travel, a lot; they make you jealous of “Matt,” as he is always called, for his journey-ing and the way he has found to pay for it; and they make you like him despite your jealousy.
That is how it went down Saturday at the Bean in Millennium Park, where Matt did the dance about 25 more times during and after filming a Chicago scene for his third video, due out next June. Six times he did it for the video proper, the idea of which is to film Matt dancing around the world again, but this time among however many locals want to come out and join him in what Harding calls a “mural of human silliness” and a “nice ballet of chaos and confusion.”
The rest of the dances he did afterward, as many of the crowd of about 100 people hung around to chat or to score their own YouTube-era souvenir: footage of them dancing with Matt.
For Jessie Thomas, a mother of three who was in town from Jellico, Tenn., with her husband for a medical conference, it was a chance to meet the man who is, in essence, her kids’ gym teacher.
“I home-school,” she said. “For P.E., we do the Matt dance.”
Iris Esch-Williams, a sociology instructor at Indiana University, happened to be in Millennium Park, saw the Matt swarm forming and realized this was sociology in the making.
“A half-hour ago, I had no idea who Matt was,” she said. By the end, after the scenes filmed in front of the Bean and then under the Bean for that mirror effect, she was an expert.
“Everybody knows Matt. You feel like he’s your next-door neighbor,” she said. “I’ll get home, I’ll tell my students, ‘I danced with Matt,’ and they’ll know who that is, and I’ll be more in the groove.”
Matt Tremmel, a sometime improv comedian who drove down from Milwaukee to be in the video, said, “I love unexplained joy.”
Searching the Web for his own name one day, he came across Harding’s videos and was instantly taken. “Everyone has this desire to go off and sort of do a mini-conquer of the world. Plus, it’s such a cool story. He quit his job and said, ‘I’m going traveling. See you jerks later.'”
That’s sort of how it happened. Actually, the Matt legend owes a lot to some disturbing trends in video gaming. Harding, who grew up in Westport, Conn., was doing game design, based in Australia, for a U.S. firm, getting “fat and pasty-faced sitting in front of the computer all the time,” he said. He was also growing dismayed that gamemakers were zeroing in on a young-adult-male market and using increasingly violent, misogynistic games to reach it.
“In frustration, out of sarcasm” he wrote a proposal for a game that would be called “Destroy All Humans,” about aliens coming to Earth with annihilation in their hearts. His superiors loved it, even when Harding explained that he had been kidding.
This was in February 2003. Harding quit, took his savings and planned to travel until the money ran out. Meanwhile, there was this dance he used to do “to annoy people,” for instance, when he wanted somebody who was on the phone to come to lunch with him. “My friend said, ‘Hey, you should do that stupid dance everywhere you go.’ I thought, ‘That’s a pretty good memento.'”
And so he did, using just the video setting of a Canon digital camera to take his footage. When he edited the footage and put music to it, in 2005, he e-mailed it around to some friends and later found out someone had put it up on his blog, where it drew 20,000 views before Harding knew about it.
Workers at a new chewing-gum brand, Stride, hoping to reach the young-adult market, also saw it.
“We were surfing the Internet in 2005 and stumbled upon his original video,” said Sonia Hounsell, Stride marketing director for Cadbury Adams. “We enjoyed the spirit of his video, and we thought it would be a fun thing to support. … So, we just gave Matt a call.
“Matt literally laid out a global map with places and things flagged of what he wanted to film around the world — trekking to Antarctica, dancing in London and scuba-dancing underwater in Chuuk, Micronesia, were among the many ideas he shared. Matt’s enthusiasm was infectious.”
Late in 2005, with the gum sponsorship footing the bill, he began a six-month trip to seven continents and 39 countries. The resulting second video went up the next year and quickly became even bigger than the first. It’s been seen 11 million times on YouTube alone and is that channel’s 52nd most watched all-time video.
His favorite scene in the second video gave him the inspiration for the third. In Rwanda, in a village, he started dancing, and a group of kids joined in the dancing too. It is that spirit he is trying to re-create — in HD video, this time, again with Stride paying — although he acknowledges that the world of viral video is getting “murkier and murkier as more people jump on it.”
“I remember last year, that summer, every week or so finding something amazing, sincere, genuine and creative,” he said. “Now the gaps [between such videos] are larger and larger.”
And he recognizes the danger of forcing the Matt phenomenon, too, past its natural life span. “Certainly my parents are stunned at how long it’s kept going. It was supposed to last 15 minutes, but it’s on Year 3 now,” he said. “I don’t want to keep on doing this after it’s worn out its welcome. The video’s done June 21, 2008. After that, I don’t know what I’m going to do. “
But to judge from the small but passionate crowds he’s been drawing, the Matt story hasn’t stopped resonating.
“I didn’t know that it would do this for other people, but it seems to flick a switch where they go, ‘Oh, hey, I’d forgotten this was possible.'” he said. “It’s very, very strange for me that this three-minute video seems to affect people on a deep level.”
On the other hand, he said, “Some people just look at it and go, ‘Wow, that guy is a really bad dancer.'”
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sajohnson@tribune.com
