To Float Like a Firefly * Jen Dasher, Lisa Burgess, and Jon Shimon University of Maryland his year, the University of Maryland embarked on a journey with the National Academy of Chinese Theatre Arts and coproduced A Midsummer Night's Dream. Challenges abounded in this collaboration, including a pitch by graduate design student Laree Lentz to create "floating, flickering fireflies" by coupling LEDs and weightless, unstructured chiffon (fig. 1). We set out to find products that would allow us to keep the original properties of the fabric intact. The drape and movement of chiffon is very specific. The LEDs we were familiar with would drastically stiffen and completely alter these properties. The new products we found were key to the success of this project. Aniomagic, a startup in Colorado, makes an "LED sequin" and matching control board. Up to twenty LEDs can be controlled from a single control board. The boards store preprogrammed sequences and can be reprogrammed using any smart device or computer as the Aniomagic website transmits code optically to the control board; it's as simple as holding the control board up to the screen and pressing "Send." As we constructed the costumes we addressed the following problems: Figure 1. A floating, flickering firefly 36 theatre design & technology s p r i n g 2013