Bianca Bartz
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Matt Harding, best known for his “Where the Hell is Matt” website and “Dancing” videos, has started a global impromptu dancing phenomenon. Matt, 31, has spent the last 14 months creating a new video, called “Where the Hell Is Matt 2008,” a four-and-a-half-minute YouTube clip that, since posting two weeks ago, has had 4,655,756 views. The new video was filmed in 42 countries and features thousands of people who joined Matt in his dance. The briefly summarize for those who haven’t yet seen these videos, Matt documented short clips of himself doing the same goofy dance at different places around the world, then sent them to his parents to keep them up to date with where in the world he was. He posted them on YouTube, and they quickly became a viral sensation. Sometimes he danced alone, other times with locals in that particular region and now, it seems, he is dancing with the world. There’s not talking in the videos, just moving images of a happy guy taking in the sights of the world. Check out Matt’s original video below.
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Where The Hell Is Matt? - Traveling, Dancing & Cashing In (VIDEO)
In many ways “Dancing” is an almost perfect piece of Internet art: it’s short, pleasingly weird and so minimal in its content that it’s open to a multitude of interpretations. It could be a little commercial for one-world feel-goodism. It could be an allegory of American foreign policy: a bumptious foreigner turning up all over the world and answering just to his own inner music. Or it could be about nothing at all — just a guy dancing.
However you interpret it, you can’t watch “Dancing” for very long without feeling a little happier. The music (by Gary Schyman, a friend of Mr. Harding’s, and set to a poem by Rabindranath Tagore, sung in Bengali by Palbasha Siddique, a 17-year-old native of Bangladesh now living in Minneapolis) is both catchy and haunting.
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