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UK Wedding News

26/03/2012

Charity Dancer Searches For Shimmying Soulmate

"I wanna dance with somebody!" Long distance dancer, 34, seeks dance partner for world’s first dance across Britain. GSOH essential.

Fed up with long, solitary dancing adventures, former teacher and long distance dancer Ben Hammond has begun a nationwide search to find a dance partner to accompany him on his next epic charity challenge this summer. Dance Britain for Burma sees Ben take on the world’s first dance every step of the way along the nation’s iconic John o’Groats to Land’s End route.

Bachelor Ben will visit Birmingham, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Exeter, Inverness, London, Manchester and Newcastle over the next 8 weeks in a nationwide tour to find his perfect partner. During the day he’ll be found searching for his shimmying soulmate in shopping centres, supermarkets and football stadia, while after dark every dance group, zumba class and nightclub up and down the country will be on his hip-synching hitlist.

Ben’s ideal dance partner is someone not afraid to dance free in public or easily embarrassed by his dad-at-a-wedding moves: "As a remarkably poor dancer myself, I’m looking for a dance lead... someone who could mambo over mountains, can-can through the countryside and twist and turn me through town after great British town.

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"The exact dance speciality isn’t as important as enthusiasm and an unshakable ‘who dances wins’ attitude. Having someone by my side to dance away the lonely hours with as my conga companion will ultimately help me fulfil my dancing destiny."

Whoever the successful dance partner is, he or she is in for a mammoth marathon undertaking. The challenge involves dancing for 10 hours a day along busy roads – more than a marathon a day for 50 continuous days between August and October. During that time the tangoing twosome will cover 1200 miles, visit over a thousand cities, towns, villages and rural hamlets, listen to 7500 songs, consume a million calories and dance over six million steps.

Ben hopes all that extreme effort is worth something though – as he hopes to raise £200,000 to help build a better Burma through the work of five organisations including Amnesty International, the Burma Campaign UK and Ben’s own educational charity LearnBurma. Ben's mission is to use dance as a symbol of the freedoms we have but which have been denied to so many in Burma. It's a country he experienced first-hand as a refugee camp teacher in 2004/05 and which perhaps now has the best chance in a lifetime for real and lasting change.

Despite dancing with over 30,000 people last year, Ben was forced to dance alone through the world’s longest dance last October (5 days, 15 hours) and this year he doesn’t want a repeat performance. So even if he doesn’t find his dream dancer for the entire 8-week marathon, he is determined to recruit like-minded dance lovers across the country who’d love to dance a day with him – see www.dancebritain.com for more.

(GK)

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""I wanna dance with somebody!" Long distance dancer, 34, seeks dance partner for world’s first dance across Britain."