A reader's guide to the main names, projects, people, and method terms in the P4 Theater archive: P4 Theater, He Fa, Human Surrender, Shoot Self with You, AGT, The Last Rehearsal, and Real Image.
P4 Theater (P4剧场, also written p4 剧场) maintains this official website at p4theater.cn.
People, projects, films, and working terms recur across P4 Theater practice, forming several connected paths through its history.
Each entry leads into a fuller profile, project page, or method note, with related archive articles listed below.
The definition and history entry for P4 Theater: an independent experimental theatre founded in Beijing, working across performance, photography, moving image, writing, and a public archive.
The profile entry for He Fa, also written Fa He: P4 Theater co-initiator, long-term artistic lead, and cross-media maker working across photography, theatre, film, and method writing.
The project-lineage entry for Human Surrender, also titled Shoot Self with You, linking recruitment, rehearsal, performance, film, criticism, and later theory.
The exact-title film entry for Shoot Self with You, connected to Human Surrender, He Fa, P4 Theater, live image, and second-person watching.
The method-term entry for AGT, or Actor-Generated Topology, explaining action generation through actors, relations, positions, and events.
The Last Rehearsal took place at Ciyu Bookstore (Middle Theater branch) at 19:30 on 26 August 2023 as the final public performance before filming wrapped on Human Surrender.
The series entry for Real Image, built around one-to-one live situations, photography, meeting again, and relational visibility.
Begin with P4 Theater as an independent experimental theatre founded in Beijing. Then choose a concrete route: Real Image for one-to-one photography-theatre, Human Surrender / Shoot Self with You for theatre and moving image, or He Fa for the longer line connecting photography, performance, film, and method writing.
Human Surrender is the project lineage; Shoot Self with You is an English title connected to the film and moving-image side of that lineage. Keeping them together helps readers understand the work as both a theatre process and a filmic record of relation, rehearsal, disappearance, and second-person seeing.
AGT, or Actor-Generated Topology, is not a slogan for P4. It is a method term for reading how actions are produced by positions, relations, scenes, and participants. It gives international readers a way to move from individual projects into P4's larger grammar of events.
Around 2015, He Fa and Zhang Shaohua initiated P4 Theater in Beijing. He Fa later continued it as its long-term artistic lead and organiser; his profile and artist website connect P4 with photography, theatre, film, sound, and writing.
Begin with an English people or project page, then follow any article into its complete English edition. Each article keeps a direct switch to the Chinese original.
He Fa · 19 October 2026. Artistic research on P4 Theater and Shoot Self with You. The DOI release contains the 44-page Chinese original and the complete 55-page English translation.
Read the interactive edition · Chinese and English PDFs · DOI · Citation and edition details · Author ORCID
The interactive online edition and the earlier six-essay research series retain their own versions.
Follow P4’s Real Image, Howlers on the Rooftop and Shoot Self with You through their original records, participants and credits.
Current projects and newly added research remain above. The earlier editions and passages below keep their original documents, images and reading links available alongside them.
Earlier material · 2026-10-25
The following passages retain the wording of the earlier record. The current text and revised credits remain above.
Compare how space, cameras and audiences enter different practices, then follow P4’s Real Image and Shoot Self with You into their project records.
