1 Proceedings of the 1 st International Conference on Digital Technologies for the Textile Industries Manchester, UK, 5-6 September 2013 Responsive e-textiles for dance. Lyle Reilly, School of Art and Design, AUT University, Auckland 1020 New Zealand lyle.reilly@aut.ac.nz ABSTRACT. The development of e-textiles requires a multidisciplinary approach, utilising a variety of technical and specialist disciplinary inputs. Such collaborative processes require a well focused coordinated approach to draw together both technical and aesthetic development considerations. This paper focuses on how such an approach was embraced for the development of an e-textiles project for interactive dance performance. The project team consisting of researchers from the Textile & Design lab (TDL) at AUT University worked closely with New Zealand Dance Company to create a smart dance costume that visually responded to both the emotive music and the physical movement of the performer. An iterative process of experimentation, analysis, prototyping, testing and review was undertaken by the research team. Importantly input and feedback from the costume and lighting designers, dancers and choreographer was pivotal to creating an aesthetic that responds naturally and in one with performer and audio for the piece. As a result the work took on a more creatively adventurous response than that of a traditional technical problem solving approach of imbedding existing computer functionality and thus demonstrates the potential of expressive e-textiles for further development and even commercial possibilities. Key words: e-textiles; dance; fibre optic; knitting.