Elspe Festival is a

theatre Theatre or theater is a collaborative form of performing art that uses live performers, usually actors or actresses, to present the experience of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place, often a stage. The perform ...

festival in

Elspe (Lennestadt) Elspe is a small town in a region named Sauerland. Elspe has a total population of 2904 people with over 21 percent of its people being 65 years or older. Elspe is part of the town Lennestadt Lennestadt (occasionally also ''die Lennestadt'') l ...

Germany Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous country in Europe after Russia, and the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is situated betwe ...

. Since 1952/1964,

Karl May Karl Friedrich May ( , ; 25 February 1842 – 30 March 1912) was a German author. He is best known for his 19th century novels of fictitious travels and adventures, set in the American Old West with Winnetou and Old Shatterhand as main pro ...

's adventure novels about

Winnetou Winnetou is a fictional Native American hero of several novels written in German by Karl May (1842–1912), one of the best-selling German writers of all time with about 200 million copies worldwide, including the ''Winnetou'' trilogy. The cha ...

are put on stage. The festival became hugely popular after 1976 when

Pierre Brice Pierre-Louis Le Bris (6 February 1929 – 6 June 2015), known as Pierre Brice, was a French actor, best known as portraying fictional Apache-chief Winnetou in German films based on Karl May novels. Life and films Brice was born in Brest, Brit ...

, a French actor known for Apache Gold and further movies adapting Karl May's novels, played Winnetou (1976–1980, 1982–1986) at Elspe. In 1980, the festival attracted 404,758 visitors. In 2019, the festival has been attracting 219,000 visitors. ''Elspe Festival'' is not to be confused with

Karl May Festival in Bad Segeberg The 'Karl May Festival' (german: link=no, Karl-May-Spiele Bad Segeberg,') is a theatre festival in Bad Segeberg Bad Segeberg (; Low German: Sebarg) is a German town of 16,000 inhabitants, located in the state of Schleswig-Holstein, capital of t ...

or Karl-May-Festtage in Radebeul.

References

Official website
(History, in German)
Karl-May-Wiki on Elspe Festival
(in German) Theatre festivals in Germany {{Germany-festival-stub