2021 / Participatory theatre, role-playing and experiments in organisation

Purples / Purple Action

Roles, rules, speech and collective judgment become theatre within a jointly constructed fictional world.

Closing frame of the Purples project trailer, 2021. Original frame preserved.

HE FA’S ROLE

Co-initiated with Shen Bolun and Shao Yifan

Complete chapter contents

Year: 2021
Medium: Participatory theatre, role-playing and experiments in organisation
Role: Co-initiated with Shen Bolun and Shao Yifan

One project, several theatre models

Coliseum / Final Solution centres on fictional organisations, deliberative assemblies and decisions about who may remain. Saturday Four-Hour Duel Club places six fighters, a four-hour countdown and audience voting in a boxing gym. These models developed within Purples, each with its own rules and records.

Population registration, assemblies, newspapers, community groups and participants’ speech form the workings of this world. The archive includes rules, role texts, moving images and subsequent reflection.

A later Presentation Proposal adds CCTV, a model built around video meetings and individual monitoring spaces, and arranges the three models as a sequence of three days. This document records an intended structure; completed events are identified through their own dated records.

Explore Final Solution ↗ · Explore Duel Club ↗

Project trailer

2021 / 1′48″

A montage of project footage, approximately 1 minute 48 seconds. Original Chinese captions, eye bars, editing and soundtrack are retained. Watch on YouTube ↗

Selected project documents

These selections retain the original layout and source page numbers. Prepared in September 2026, they preserve the rules and proposed schedules of each document’s own version.

The introduction describes the project’s origins, fictional world and theatre models. The presentation document proposes an arrangement of three models and a residency schedule; it is a historical proposal.

Sources: original project documents 02, Project Introduction, and 03, Presentation Proposal. English text on this page is an editorial translation.

A line through the work

When people make rules together, who can speak, judge and change them?

Work record

Purples / Purple Action, 2021. Participatory theatre, role-playing and experiments in organisation. He Fa’s role: Co-initiated with Shen Bolun and Shao Yifan.

Work / series: Purples / Purple Action
Date: 2021
Medium: Participatory theatre, role-playing and experiments in organisation
He Fa’s role: Co-initiated with Shen Bolun and Shao Yifan
Catalogue section: Collaborative practice

Cite this record: Purples / Purple Action · 2021 · Co-initiated with Shen Bolun and Shao Yifan · https://hefa.p4theater.cn/en/work/purple-action

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TAKE A PATH ACROSS

Other paths from this work.

Working together
How a collaboration takes another name
Purples / Purple Action P4 Theater
Purples was co-initiated by Shen Bolun, He Fa and Shao Yifan; P4 hosts different projects and initiators. Connected platforms do not share identical authorship, and a new collective name establishes a boundary of credit worth retaining.
2021 / Participatory theatre, role-playing and experiments in organisation
2015–present / Long-term art practice, live work and archives
Read the source materials
1. Period documentSelected project documents ↗
  Selected pages of the Purple Action project introduction preserve co-initiation, origins and structure; the spatial presentation plan remains a historical proposal.
2. Later accountEnabling participants to initiate work ↗
  He Fa’s 2024 account and the 2025 ten-year archive explicitly preserve participant-initiated projects; platform support does not replace project authorship.
Continue from this work ↗

Explore crossings from this work ↗

2026-10-04 / ARCHIVAL ADDITION

Source materials, process and versions

An internal-test recruitment text describes choices within a fictional world; a spatial proposal divides activities across days. Proposals, space photographs and recordings allow the rules to be compared with their implementation.