Designing Embodied Wearable Technology to Enhance Kinesthetic Expression for Dance Performance

This work consists of two live-programmable, 124 LED-integrated costumes whose pixel-mapped lighting is shaped during performance. Most dance wearables remain decorative or pre-programmed and rarely support the dancer's internal experience. Many also restrict movement through rigid electronics or bulky equipment. The costumes counter these limitations by integrating a Pixelblaze microcontroller and LEDs into custom textiles that preserve comfort and full range of motion. Through iterative prototyping, the costumes were refined for coherence, mobility, and perceived expressivity. The system merges live programming input with dancers' emotional responses to reveal duet dynamics of expansion, contraction, stillness, and energy shifts that existing wearables cannot display in real time on the body.