Topic

Participatory theatre: what it is, in P4 Theater’s works and methods

What is participatory theatre?

Participatory theatre lets the audience enter the action instead of only watching it. P4 Theater frames it with three questions: what can participants decide, can they change what happens next, and how does the work respond to their choices? Its works Purples, Duel Club and Final Solution have participants speak, vote and decide together.

P4 Theater’s working definition

In its guide to Chinese experimental theatre, P4 Theater separates terms that are often merged: experimental theatre describes a method, independent theatre describes production and organisation, small theatre describes scale. Participatory theatre describes how an audience enters the action: what participants can decide, whether they can change what happens next, and how the work responds to their choices.

A vote opens power, and also fixes its limits

The open call for Duel Club (Purples, 2021) announced six performers/players inside one model, with the audience voting on who stays until one winner remains. P4’s feature on the work notes that choosing among given options is not the same as setting the rules: who may sign up, how many start, when elimination happens and who announces the result are still the conditions of the vote. What matters is not whether there is interaction, but what the interaction changes.

Stopping is part of participation

He Fa’s method card: a participatory work remains open only when people can pause, refuse, withdraw and decide whether an image or story may continue (the right to stop). Action itself is understood as action generated through relations, produced among people, positions, rules, spaces and situations.

Participatory works at P4 Theater

Work	Year	Form (official)	He Fa’s role
Purples / Purple Action (participatory theatre and role-play)	2021	Participatory theatre, role-playing and experiments in organisation	Co-initiated with Shen Bolun and Shao Yifan
Saturday Four-Hour Duel Club (interactive theatre and voting games)	2021–2023	Interactive theatre, a voting game and a transcript archive	Purples co-initiation and collaborative development of its game models
Final Solution (deliberation game)	2021	Participatory theatre, a deliberation game and process documentation	Purples co-initiation, participation in assemblies and authored reflection
控诉爱情失败后的中间派自救指南 (p4u immersive theatre)	2021	P4U immersive theatre; associated writing	Author of the signed announcement “Who Are the Centrists?”
天台上的嚎叫者	2020–2021	Theatre, rehearsal and documentation	P4 organizing and 3P documentation
Happiness Kingdom (collective puppet-making and role-play)	2023	Collective puppet-making, role play and an evolving theatrical environment	Co-design of formats, rules and models, and organisation through P4
How to Eat a Banana? (p4x workshop)	2021	P4X workshop	Initiator