CSC lights up with story of ‘The Ugly Duckling’

Glowing neon puppets lit up the night on Memorial Hall’s main stage, Thursday evening, The creations belong to Lightwire Theatre Company, and Shellie Johns brought the New Orleans-based team to Chadron as a part of the Galaxy Series events. Lightwire, on tour across America, brought two classic children’s tales, “The Ugly Duckling” and “The Tortoise and The Hare,” to life.

Lightwire deals in paradoxes. Old meets new in their part-puppet, part pantomime technique. The stage is plunged into darkness, and the centuries-old fables are played out with larger-than-life, electric puppets. The meeting of old-world stories and new-age techniques is a fanciful marriage, but it works to the company’s advantage. Since the stories are well-known, the performers aren’t worried about major plot points becoming lost in the mime. If audience members aren’t familiar with the tales, the show, with its universally-recognizable emotions, is still enjoyable.

“I’d never heard [the Ugly Duckling’s] story before,” Jordan Trueblood, said after the show. “I thought it was just a mutant duck.”

Trueblood, despite seeing the tale for the first time, still appreciated the format.

Corbin Popp and Ian Karney, Lightwire’s creators, pioneered the troupe’s unique puppetry style.

The dancers wear full-body character suits, which are covered with luminescent wire. Wearing all black, the performers disappear into their glowing characters, lending the animals life without highlighting themselves. Trained in dance, the cast tell the entire story through music and movement. Their graceful physicality, coupled with the glowing puppets, make magic.

The audience realized the real magic, however, when the show ended. During the curtain call, a single spotlight revealed the dancer inside each suit. The house-lights came up, and Elizabeth Daniels, Cody Jarrell, Steven Nicholson, and Michael Bagne stood on stage. “Do you all have any questions?” Nicholson asked.

The first hand shot up.

“How are there only four of you?” an audience member asked.

With an illuminated set, constant music changes, moving props, and cast of over ten animals, it seemed impossible that four performers could control it all.

But they did just that.

Lightwire’s real magic, more so than dance and light, was teamwork. The quartet worked with rhythmic precision both on and off stage, and that made the stories work. The flashy, light-up style caught the crowd’s attention, but the cast maintained it with quick changes and constant focus. Even when disaster struck, the team’s synchronization picked up the slack.

“During this show alone,” Daniels said after the Chadron show, “two luminescent wires shorted, one of my rabbit ears broke, and one of my costume straps came undone.”

This meant for half of “The Ugly Duckling,” Daniels held her 50-pound costume up with one hand and controlled it with the other.

“We’ve become really good at fixing things,” Daniels said.

They’ve also become masters at multi-tasking. While one member runs the light board, another controls four duckling puppets while wearing a cat costume. Despite these hectic elements, the show unites into a poetic retelling.

Like a portrait made with common brushes and living paint, Lightwire combines rudimentary materials and electric creativity to produce a mesmerizing show. At one point, the Ugly Duckling’s antagonist, a galvanized orange cat, leaps in slow motion at his feathered prey. To achieve the mid-air freeze, Jarrell lands on a wheeled office chair base and imitates a freeze-frame pounce. The amazing thing is, in the auditorium’s darkness, the effect is “purrfect.” The show’s minimalistic format and complex electronics complement in the strangest way; it’s another paradox at Lightwire’s disposal.

The paradoxes also extend beyond format. In Lightwire’s show, a child hear “Flight of the Valkyries” and the theme from “Mission: Impossible” in one show. Like their choice of music, Lightwire Theater company mixes classical story telling with a modern vivacity. By matching one of man’s oldest art forms, theatre, with the newest live techniques, the four performers aim for the age-old art of theatre to meet a new generation of patrons.

“Is this anyone’s first time?” Nicholson asked the audience after Thursday’s show.

A chorus of young voices affirmed.

“That’s our favorite thing, when it’s someone’s first show,” He said. “I want you kids to remember how you felt here tonight, surrounded by all these people, enjoying the theatre. When you guys respond to us, it makes our night,” Nicholson said, as he and the rest of Lightwire’s cast started to exit the stage.

“Remember,” he said before leaving the spotlight, “this is like no other art form.”

The Lightwire cast love performing. They have to, when their national tour includes 57 performances of the same show, most in out-of-the-way locations. The group act for a greater cause, however: theatre advocacy. They aim to inspire children by exposing them to theatre early.

“That’s how we all got started,” Daniels said, “We were inspired, and being able to do that all over the country is extraordinary.”

Extraordinary is how a single person can bring, with only their body and music, a whole cast of characters to life. Extraordinary is Lightwire’s show, which takes humble materials and superior commitment to make an honest, and inspiring, story.