Chapter Seven: Digital Costuming

This chapter examines wearable technology used in dance performance. It begins with a discussion of Troika Ranch’s In Plane (1994), a pioneering dance solo that featured a costume lined with motion sensors, and goes on to detail a personal experiment with a motion-tracking suit. Anarchy Dance Theatre’s Second Body (2015), a work which clothes a dancer in interactive digital light is also considered. Methodologically, dance history, interviews, and practice-based research are developed in dialogue with concepts from the contemporary philosophy of technology (multistability, mediation, and virtual re-embodiment) and this develops points made in earlier chapters regarding equipmentality and ampliative somaesthetic imagination. It also informs a discussion, at the end of the chapter, about the ethics of digital abstraction.