A close reading of Purple Action's 2021 open call: how six players, audience voting and elimination rules reorganise spectatorship, and why the design of the rules must be distinguished from what happened at the event.
P4 Theater website essay · 2026-09-07
After watching, there is a choice
The open call for Saturday Four-Hour Duel Club announces that six performers/players will enter the same model. Audience voting decides who stays and who leaves, producing one winner. Compared with simply watching a prearranged performance, there is an additional, explicit step: spectators make a choice that can affect what happens next.1
Attention itself thereby acquires consequences. The choice of whom to support may depend on performance, strategy, identification or a temporary alliance. These possible motives, however, cannot be taken as the actual thoughts of that evening's audience. The original call establishes that voting power existed. How voting happened and how reasons were articulated require records of the event.
Why are performer and player placed together?
The call uses both performer and player, proposing that participants play fighters while also playing themselves. There is tension between these positions. As a performer, a person acts for others to watch; as a player, their actions are affected by rules and outcomes.1
This conjunction means that the work cannot be judged solely by how convincingly someone performs a role. An action may further the performance while also being a strategy for remaining in the arena. When actual identity and a game role are brought together, audiences can readily extend judgments of an action into judgments of a person. Studying such an event therefore requires tracking exactly what is being evaluated, without equating a position in the game with the whole person.
Voting opens power while also defining its limits
Being able to vote does give spectators a capacity to act. But choosing among given options is not the same as deciding all the rules. Who can apply, how many people begin, when elimination occurs and who announces the result still constitute the conditions under which voting operates.1
The question for participatory theatre is consequently more than whether interaction occurs. It concerns what interaction changes and what remains for the organisers to decide. This does not negate the significance of voting; it specifies what voting does. Simply saying that spectators become co-authors omits the limits of shared decision-making. Simply saying that spectators are manipulated erases the responses and choices they make in practice.
Four hours of records need to be read as a process
P4's article archive preserves records titled the first, second, third and fourth hours of Duel Club, 23 October. The corresponding archival pages were published on 10 April 2023, while the performance date announced by the open call belongs to the context of 2021. Publication time and event time must not be conflated.21
Preserving the material hour by hour offers a way into changes in the situation. The most valuable questions may concern not who finally won, but when rules became significant, who began explaining them, how participants responded to a decision and whether relationships from one hour carried into the next. This essay has not checked the four-hour event passage by passage, and therefore supplies no unverified winner, vote count or account of a conflict.
From winning and losing back to the responsibilities of looking
This model makes part of theatrical judgment visible. Ordinarily, an audience member can silently like or dislike something. Voting turns a preference into a result. The question raised by the work is whether people watch in the same way when they know their choices will affect others.
To understand Duel Club, begin with the rules in the open call, continue into the hourly records, and then compare them with other participants' writing. P4's ten-year retrospective places the work among relationships between different projects and participants. It also reminds us that this work belongs to Purple Action's particular practice and should not be passed over as merely an abstract example of a P4 style.3
Sources and original texts
- Call for Performers/Players | Duel Club: A Real-Life Battle Royale! — Purple Action, 2021-09-25
2. The First Hour | Duel Club, 23 October — P4 Theater, 2023-04-10
3. P4 Theater, Ten Years — He Fa, 2025-03-08
An essay for the P4 Theater website, based on public archives. Its analysis is not presented as the direct speech of He Fa or other participants; historical source texts retain their own credits and dates.
Chinese webpage: https://p4theater.cn/knowledge/duel-club-voting/