The holidays are always certain to be filled with bright displays of lights, shimmering in the dark. This holiday season, however, offers a far more unique take on the tradition.

Lightwire Theater is scheduled to perform at Bremerton’s Admiral Theatre on Dec. 5. The dinner-and-show event features professional dancing and puppetry, but not likely in any manner seen before.

“Lightwire Theater is a theatrical company that uses a product called ‘el-wire,’ ” said Ian Carney of Lightwire. “It’s electro-luminescent wire that creates characters.

“It’s not dots, like LEDs are. This lends itself to make organic creatures you can believe in. We are not a fan of (using) people in our shows, we are more a fan of characters and animals and telling stories through those creatures to transport the audience into another world.”

The world that Lightwire plans to bring to Bremerton is a tale apt for the holidays: “A Very Electric Christmas.”

“The Christmas show is a full- length story,” Carney said. “It traces the path of a family of birds flying south to New Orleans for the winter, which happens to be our hometown.

“During that flight, they encounter a blizzard and a baby bird is thrown off course and ends up in the North Pole.”

The show features nutcracker soldiers, rats, gloworms, flowers, a Christmas tree and many other characters, all brought to life using modern, illuminating tech and performed in complete darkness.

Lightwire Theater doesn’t use dialogue to progress its stories, rather, it’s entirely done with music and dancing. The stage is dark — darker than it normally would be for other productions. The wires cast light in shapes and patterns, which dancers then use to create the characters and stories. It’s like a mixture of ballet and Tron.

The format works well for Carney, who with his wife, Eleanore, come from a dancing background.

“My wife and I, as a career, are ballet dancers,” Carney said. “We danced lots of Nutcrackers and Romeo and Juliets and classical ballet. I was always raised with classical ballet. The bonus of that was that I was not raised with words, I was raised with telling stories wordlessly.”

He added, “If the emotion is too big to speak, you sing it, and if it’s too big to sing it, you dance it.”

The wordless act breaks through borders and finds audiences with people who may not normally attend theater, Carney said.

“We’ve performed all over the world because of that,” he said. “There’s no translation. We go to Hong Kong and we do the same show. Whether it’s Russia or Columbia or Germany.”

While viewers may not have seen them in Hong Kong or Russia, they may recognize the company from TV.

Lightwire Theater performed in season 7 of “America’s Got Talent.” It’s tech-savvy performances brought them to the top four acts.

“It was a good experience. We were nervous going into it,” Carney said. “They had found us on YouTube. They called us to be a part of it.”

The theater company had mixed feelings about appearing on such a show that verged on reality TV, Carney said. At the time, Lightwire Theater was emerging as a successful family business.

“But you can’t deny the exposure it would give,” Carney said. “ And a lot has come from ‘America’s Got Talent.’ We did a competition show in France because of ‘America’s Got Talent.’ We toured with Sony to introduce a new phone in France.”

Now, Lightwire Theater is back on TV, this time in a new competition-based show, “Fake Off,” airing on Tru TV.

“This competition show has 10 acts in it,” Carney said. We just did our second performance on (Nov. 17).”

The show airs every Monday until its conclusion. The show gives each artistic team a challenge that is based in pop culture. Each team then finds a way to interpret it in its own unique way.

“It’s a bit more celebratory than sensational,” Carney said. “They delve into the artist a little bit more.”

While Lightwire is brightening up TV, Carney said that to truly see what the buzz is all about, viewers need to get to a theater.

“The television side has been good to us and given us a wider viewership for our live shows which is where we shine,” he said.

“When you see it live, it’s a whole other thing. If you’ve seen it on ‘America’s Got Talent’ and liked it there, when you see it live, it’s a whole other visual.”

That visual, and the modern, tech-friendly methods of storytelling speaks to the aspiration of Lightwire Theater, Carney said, which is to introduce theater to audiences that aren’t inclined to go.

“Because of its visual components and its storytelling, we feel like we have an opportunity to get people back into the theater,” he said. “The theater is competing against DVD and blogging and video games and everything that takes you away from the human experience.”

Carney said he enjoys taking crafts that are thousands of years old and reintroducing them.

“Puppetry and dance and storytelling are old, but now it’s upgraded,” he said. “We bring it to today’s audience, and it seems as current as the new Apple computer, but it’s really based in ancient times. We really enjoy that aspect of doing what we do.”