ABSTRACT
The nature of performance as event gained in relevance at the turn of the last century, when Peter Behrens, Georg Fuchs, and others proclaimed that theatre must again become festival.1 Soon after, Max Herrmann claimed to have found the “original meaning of theatre” in the “theatre-fest” which was constituted by its different participants, actors and spectators alike. All of them felt that the specific aestheticity of theatre was manifest in the nature of performance as event. Behrens, Fuchs, and Herrmann contradicted traditional convictions of an aesthetics rooted in the work of art and opened new perspectives for the debate on the arts and aesthetics.
