Light is a power-charged substance with which we have a primary connection (James Turrell). In this primary connection, light has accompanied and moved humanity throughout all times. It is all the more astonishing that the performative theater research largely overlooks this central cultural and aesthetically significant phenomenon beyond semiotics and technique. What happens when light illuminates nothing but is merely its own presence, when we consider pure light? James Turrell's light installations play with the peculiarities and power of light. They treat it as the sole content and as an independent entity. It illuminates nothing, only presents itself, revealing its inherently performative character. Turrell's installations have the ability to shake our perception to its foundations, causing spaces and times to collapse into one another. The examination of Turrell's light installation 'Bridget's Bardo', the long-exposure theater photographs by Jo Preussler and Aljoscha Begrich, as well as the staging 'Máquina Hamlet' by the Argentine object theater group El Periférico de Objetos leads to the realization that light condenses into seemingly haptic material within the optics of the performative, materializing into an almost tangible substance while producing living images. Based on the performative light, a completely new concept of theater images emerges, one that is open-ended and receptive to the process of change, to overwriting and subjective perspectives, making the previously invisible visible. A performative image.