The adoption of the eventName element by the TEI in Fall 2023, promised a new way for researchers encoding historical documents to annotate occurrences in ways similar to those we use to recognize people, places, and organizations. Understandably, there was some question at the time about what constitutes an event, or what rises to the level of an event. Ultimately, among the examples chosen when the element was published included what might be described as significant events (those worthy of 'proper noun' status): World War II, the 1618 Defenestration of Prague, and the TEI 2019 Conference (!) I would suggest that these are events by consensus – occurrences that are notable because many people agreed to confer named fame to them.

And yet, encoding archival materials that are contemporaneous with such famous phenomena (in my case performances connected to political occasions in early modern London) there is a lack of explicit references to 'proper noun' events like the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth I, the English victory over the Spanish Armada, or the Marriage of Princess Elizabeth Stuart and Frederick V. Rather, in correspondence, personal diaries, municipal and financial records studied as part of the REED London project, I have realized that people are more likely to focus on what are really nested or micro-events undertaken in relation to those phenomena, but which are contextually important because of the micro-event itself: production of a masque, procession through the streets of London, a mock sea-battle on the River Thames. All of these performance events were planned, funded, performed by, and witnessed by unnamed Londoners as well as notable people. The records and eyewitness accounts that describe the performances sometimes refer obliquely to a super-event (coronation, victory, wedding festivities) but not always, and the focus of the people who wrote the letters, organized the dances, and tracked the expenses clearly was on the business of the production. But are these events that rise to the level that the TEI Council envisioned? At what point do the details about planning, production, and observation of a performance collapse under the weight of a tagged document?

In the past year I have collaborated with a group of researchers extending the Linked Art ontology to include to better represent performing arts data (which is itself an extension of the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model). Using the Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray's Inn as the first test of a very complex example of this type of nested event, I have been trying to create lemma-level connections between the richly-encoded TEI files that reveal components of the preparation and production of the Masque evidenced in the REED London records and the structured LAPA data model. In this paper I will present the progress I am making in making meaningful connections between TEI event structures and the LAPA modeling techniques. In doing so I will consider how far we can push the eventName element to sustain such connections, and when those connections necessarily break, or must be adjusted.