Edward Gordon Craig was one of the leading figures of modernist theater. His books, stage designs, manifestos, and collaborations all contributed to an understanding of performance as an autonomous aesthetic activity, as a creative event that does not rely solely on the multifaceted transpositions of the literary text, but offers a unique, synaesthetic possibility of combining different art forms. Craig’s work was crucial in conceiving of performance as a live, ephemeral but dynamic event that may derive from a literary text but is never confined to it.