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P4 Theatre

Space not as venue, but as a device for generating relations

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 is not simply a venue. It is a long-term artistic system for producing works, relations, learning and collective experience.

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 does not produce a fixed style. It produces a method: Who may initiate? Who is permitted to watch? Who carries the failure? Performances, workshops, open calls, writing, moving-image records and long-term social ties all become material.

P4 SYSTEM / 2015–PRESENT

The work is not the result on stage, but five recurring operations.

Site

Read the limits of an abandoned structure, office, boxing gym, bookstore or private room.

Open call

Participants’ identities, desires, hesitation and capacities enter the structure.

Event

Rules trigger action without guaranteeing a dramatic result in advance.

Record

Photography, film, text and sound alter the situation they document.

Return

The archive re-enters workshops, writing and further action; the system keeps growing.

PROJECT RESEARCH LAYER

P4’s most important work is not a single performance, but a decade-long way of organizing people and space.

P4 turns theatre from an art category into a working method. Each project begins with real constraints: a room that is too small, insufficient resources, non-professional participants and relations that cannot be simplified. Constraints are not concealed; they become structure.

01 / Site

Non-standard sites are not substitutes

Abandoned factories, offices, boxing gyms, bookstores and private rooms carry prior orders of labor, consumption, body and privacy. Each project works through those orders.

02 / Participation

Participants enter with lived identities

Non-professionals, friends, collaborators and spectators are not interchangeable material. Experience, capacity, fear and the wish to leave all modify the project in return.

03 / Archive

Documentation returns to action

Texts, open calls, images, sound and workshops are not secondary records. They become teaching material, memory devices and sources of dispute for the next action.

WORKING SEQUENCE