Ben from the Beginning: Road Trip 2010
It all began one day when I woke up and realised I was free. Free to do whatever I wanted, to do the things I loved to do… And one of those things, ever since I was young, was dance. Not well, not skillfully, but freely. Then I spent a year teaching in a refugee camp on the Thai-Burma border, and couldn’t believe all the freedoms I had but others didn’t. So the more I thought about it, the more I realised that the feeling of freedom I got from dancing was a great symbol of the freedom we in the UK have but those in Burma traditionally lacked. So one day I set off around the country to see if Britain was free to dance with me in the name of freedom for Burma…
Sorry about the pyjamas. And the open mouth.
Learning to Dance 2011
With my cunning plan to dance a world record (then standing at a mere 100 hours of continuous dancing) in my back pocket, I figured that I quite frankly needed to get a bit better at dancing. So I hot-footed it around learning all kinds of dances with all kinds of dance groups, and getting as many schools as I could to be free to dance too…
The London Marathon 2011
Next I decided, as I was in need of some serious endurance training, to dance the London Marathon. As you do. I called them up and found out that no-one had ever danced the whole way around either, so the scene was set for some serious dance marathoning. Here’s a clip of me at the start… wait for it… oh, jump to 2:25 if you really must…
Glastodancer: Dancing Through Glastonbury 2011
Even with a full marathon under my dancing belt, however, I had still only danced for 9 hours in a row. So I had to quickly get some training in where I clocked some serious hours. And what better place to do it than the world’s most famous music festival? Here’s a little promo film we made (thanks, Vauxhall Park!):
And here’s me after dancing 72 hours straight through Glastonbury, feeling quite epic:
The End: The World’s Longest Ever Dance
Then it was time for the big one. 5 days, 15 hours and 15 minutes of dancing, on and on and on. Thanks to the 6,000 people who were free to dance with me down by the Thames during those amazing days, and to the 30,000 people who I danced with throughout 2011 – you were all just brilliant.
Here’s a film on the final few seconds…
This is a jolly nice short film of the final day…
And here’s the full story, in pictures…
