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2021–2023 / Interactive theatre, a voting game and a transcript archive

Saturday Four-Hour Duel Club

Six fighters and a four-hour countdown: votes held by the audience continually change the event.

Red Duel Club poster with a multicoloured smiling face
Public poster for Duel Club, 23 October 2021.
He Fa’s role
Purples co-initiation and collaborative development of its game models
Co-initiators
Purples: Shen Bolun, He Fa and Shao Yifan
Performance
23 October 2021, 24KiCK Fight Academy, Botai branch, Beijing
Transcript publication
10 April 2023, Hours One to Four
Complete chapter contents

Turning the ring into a theatre of judgment

Saturday Four-Hour Duel Club is a performance and game model within Purples. Six recruits entered as “fighters,” bringing their lived experiences while seeking audience support. The event on 23 October 2021 took place in a Beijing boxing gym, with a four-hour countdown and five eliminations. Performance, persuasion and audience votes determined who remained, rather than fighting skills.

The call required no professional performance experience and proposed several workshop-style rehearsals. The ring, countdown, voting marbles and scales made a mechanism of allocation visible: some people competed for attention while others occupied the position of spectator and judge. He Fa co-initiated Purples with Shen Bolun and Shao Yifan, and this work developed within that collaboration.

Writing after the four hours

Four transcripts published in 2023 preserve Hours One to Four, keeping the host’s, fighters’ and spectators’ voices within the unfolding event. The call and record can be read together to examine how a rule was used through speech, questions, silence and voting. Original role labels are retained without assigning unverified real names to their lines.

A later presentation proposal

Voting with marbles in the contemporary event materials and counting votes through drinks in the later Presentation Proposal belong to different versions. The proposal retains six fighters, four hours and five eliminations while setting out another arrangement of rules and scheduling. Read these proposed conditions alongside the record of the event on 23 October 2021.

See source pages 13–14 of the Presentation Proposal. The contemporary call and four-hour transcripts remain linked on this page.

Moving image & related documents

Archive note

Compiled from contemporary calls, project descriptions, later records and selected project documents retaining their source page numbers. Event announcements, retrospective accounts and presentation proposals retain their distinct status. English translations were prepared for this archive.

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CLOSE READING / 2026 CURATORIAL INTERPRETATION

Saturday Four-Hour Duel Club

What changes when the audience can vote—and what stays?

Work date: 2021–2023Reading: 2026

Site editorial reading · AI-assisted · Version 2026-09-16

The ring borrows the space of competition and turns the contest toward securing support. Performance, lived experience, persuasion and audience judgment share a limited duration. This is not a simple advance from passive watching to active participation. Voting has consequences, but elimination restricts those consequences to staying or leaving. Spectators judge while fighters must keep seeking retention. The difference between these positions becomes materially visible in scales and a countdown.

The four-hour transcript published in 2023 adds a record of the rules being used. Readers can move from the invitation’s promises into live speech and examine what hosting, questioning, silence and persuasion did to the arrangement. Any discussion of the work’s politics should stay with these distributions rather than announcing democracy simply because a vote exists. Rules begin an event, and people within it reveal wishes and frustrations the rules have not settled.

The limits of this reading

The performance year is distinguished from transcript publication; lines are not assigned real identities without a verified correspondence.

Sources for this reading

Based on the October 2021 open calls and performance record, and the transcripts of Hours One to Four published on 10 April 2023.

Work record

Saturday Four-Hour Duel Club, 2021–2023. Interactive theatre, a voting game and a transcript archive. He Fa’s role: Purples co-initiation and collaborative development of its game models.

Work / series
Saturday Four-Hour Duel Club
Date
2021–2023
Medium
Interactive theatre, a voting game and a transcript archive
He Fa’s role
Purples co-initiation and collaborative development of its game models
Catalogue section
Collaborative practice

Cite this record: Saturday Four-Hour Duel Club · 2021–2023 · Purples co-initiation and collaborative development of its game models · https://hefa.p4theater.cn/en/work/duel-club

Read Markdown ↓All work records ↗

TAKE A PATH ACROSS

Other paths from this work.

  1. Team introduction page of the 2016 CAFAM proposal, naming FakingAosome’s founders and four projects

    Rules and choices

    The planned bounds of losing control

    Saturday Four-Hour Duel ClubThe Invisible Odyssey / Performance Exhibition Proposal

    The Invisible Odyssey sets loss of control as a proposed aim; Duel Club operates through a countdown and elimination. Both anticipate unknown outcomes, but actual voting consequences cannot substantiate a proposal whose realization remains unverified.

    2021–2023 / Interactive theatre, a voting game and a transcript archive
    2016 / Collaborative performance exhibition proposal · Proposals

    Read the source materials
    1. Period documentA proposal concerned with loss of control ↗

      The 2016 proposal aims at loss of control through actions involving a team of thirty; this is the proposal’s premise.

    2. Period documentTurning the ring into a theatre of judgment ↗

      The call for 23 October 2021 specifies six fighters, a four-hour countdown and five rounds of audience elimination votes; later proposals do not replace this version.

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FROM HERE, ELSEWHERE

Passages between works

Related records in the archive

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