Wrist Roles: LED-powered Wristbands for Social Dance Role Liberation

Here's a pet project of mine I wanted to share with the Dance-Tech community: "Wrist Roles" LED-powered Lead / Follow wristbands.

For the past couple of years, I have been thinking about how gender roles interact with dance roles in lindy hop (and other social dances.) As someone who cares deeply about this dance and wants it to be an artform that is welcoming and available to everyone, regardless of gender, orientation, identity or preference, the strict division of lindy hop into "men lead" and "women follow" has never sat well with me.

I have been trying to imagine a dance space where gender is not automatically associated with dance role, where a woman could feel free to lead and a man to follow, and that was fully affirmed and accepted. But how would that work?

To start to answer that, I created this Wrist Roles" prototypes. Read more about it here.