Site
Read the limits of an abandoned structure, office, boxing gym, bookstore or private room.
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P4 Theatre
Relations shaped through different sites
2015–至今 / present
- Year
- 2015–至今 / present
- Medium
- Long-term platform, non-standard sites, performance, workshops, writing and public events
- Role
- Founder / Director
P4 organizes performances, workshops, filming, writing and collective production across different urban sites.
02
Project statement
Since 2015, He Fa has founded and directed P4 Theatre from Beijing. Its projects occupy abandoned factories, a 16-square-metre office, boxing gyms, bookstores, industrial sites and private rooms, making spatial limits, audience routes, participant identities and production conditions part of each work.
P4 returns to several concrete questions: who may initiate, who occupies the viewing position, and who carries the consequences when an action fails. Performances, workshops, open calls, writing, moving-image records and long-term social ties shape each project.
P4 WORK / 2015–PRESENT
Five stages of P4’s work
Open call
Participants’ identities, desires, hesitation and capacities enter the structure.
→Rehearsal
Tasks and rules provide a starting point that participants keep rewriting in the room.
→Presentation
Performance, photography, film, text and sound retain different sides of each action.
→Continuation
Texts, images and unresolved questions from one event enter the next workshop or project.
PROJECT NOTES
A decade of P4 has accumulated through repeated choices of site, open calls, rehearsals, performances and records.
Each P4 project begins with the conditions at hand: the size of the site, available resources, participants’ experience and the relations already present among them. Rehearsal and performance change with those conditions.
The site sets the starting point
Abandoned factories, offices, boxing gyms, bookstores and private rooms each carry an existing use and order. The work begins from those concrete conditions.
Each person brings lived experience
Non-professionals, friends, collaborators and spectators bring different capacities, fears and willingness to leave. Those differences directly alter the project.
One event leaves material for the next
Texts, open calls, images, sound and workshop notes enter later teaching, writing and new projects.
WORKING PROCESS
Read the site
Identify existing power, circulation and traces of use.
Open the call
Invite different forms of experience without assuming uniform performance skill.
Set rules
Rules trigger relations without guaranteeing dramatic outcomes.
Preserve failure
Keep incompletion, dispute and interruption in the long-term archive.
PROJECT DETAILS
A line through the work
If theatre is first a method of organizing relations, where does the work begin—and where can it end?
Next project / 03
Iceberg
Decentralized theatre under spatial compression