Part dance, part puppetry, and part electroluminescent wiring, Lightwire Theater creates evocative stage shows featuring dinosaurs, mythic heroes and fairy tale creatures.

New Orleans

Lightwire Theater is a New Orleans-based performance company that merges dance, puppetry, and theater with electroluminescent wire to create visually striking stage shows. Founded by Eleanor and Ian Carney, along with Corbin Popp, the group crafts glowing costumes and props, often using everyday materials, to bring to life stories featuring dinosaurs, mythic heroes, and fairy tale creatures.

The company gained wider recognition after reaching the semifinals of America's Got Talent in 2012 and now tours multiple shows worldwide. Lightwire Theater emphasizes the importance of live, handmade performance and encourages audiences to appreciate the unique, shared experience of theater.

Magic in the dark: The fantastical worlds of Lightwire Theater

What on earth? No, it's not animation. Welcome to Dino Light. Produced by Lightwire Theatre. The clue is in the name. Everything on stage is defined by wires that light up. L-wire, it's called. What you see looks like magic. What you don't see is the performers making it all happen in head-to-toe black, wearing weird rigging. Wow! This is Phaedra. Kevin Chick is one of those huge birds. I have one string on the inside of the PVC that will nod the head, and then if I pull this other PVC, that's where I can get the jaw to move like this. Everything goes on with a Velcro. And how do you switch the lights on and off? The dimmer is actually right here on the strap of the backpack, so I know where it is in the dark. How would you characterize what it is that you guys do? It's dance, it's theater, it's puppetry. So this is our rehearsal space, and we make sure that it looks just like it will at each theater. New Orleans is home for Light Wire Theatre and for husband-and-wife co-founders Eleanor and Ian Carney. They met as kids. His mother taught her ballet. Both went on to careers in dance. Ian was introduced to electro-luminescent wire by fellow dancer and Light Wire co-creator Corbin Popp. He found it on party hats, kids, you know, it would glow. In 2007, Light Wire Theatre was born. We weren't engineers, we weren't electricians. I think that we are encouraging and inspiring people to get out and create their own stories, their own glowing creatures. Light Wire Theatre got a huge break when it made the semifinals of America's Got Talent in 2012. We felt very proud and surprised. Today, the company tours... ..six different shows... ..often two at once. Not just in the United States, but all over the world. What the performers can and cannot do depends entirely on being able to fold all their costumes into a few small cases, along with whatever it might take to fix them if something breaks on the road. They're teeny, tiny, teeny, tiny little wires. Central to everything is the flexible, colourful, although touchy, L-wire. The biggest problem, I would say, with L-wire is that anywhere in this entire piece, if you had any problem, something happens, the whole thing's dead. But one of Light Wire's most delicious enchantments is how do-it-yourself, how MacGyvered, the reality behind the magic is. These appear to be half a teddy bear. Yes. What are they doing? There's a lot of plushies that get thrown into the sludge during Mardi Gras because they're all thrown from the floats. So we grab them all, we wash them. It's the perfect medium to give eyes to a worm. Just look how well dryer hoses dance. This is what they look like in the show. Here's Dino Light's big fight scene in rehearsal. And now, here it is in the dark during a show at the Lafon Performing Arts Centre in Luling, Louisiana, not far from New Orleans. We've performed the show many times before, but what was different about today was you. That energy shaped the show that you saw on the stage today. At the end of each show, Ian Carney leaves the audience with this message about handmade, in-person, live performance. We were in the room together, and we shared this together. So keep remembering this feeling because this feeling happens in the theatre.

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