From the six players in Duel Club to the repeated encounters of Real Image, this essay considers how P4 uses recruitment to allocate roles, time and expectations of action, while distinguishing announcements from actual experience.
P4 Theater website essay · 2026-09-07
When does a work begin?
If a work begins when the lights come up, recruitment is merely advance publicity. Yet P4's ten-year retrospective singles out recruitment rules as an important thread. Participants enter the works through open calls, and different projects continually adjust how people join, what they bring and what they will do together.1
A recruitment notice can therefore be read as a document of form. It does more than find people. It assigns a possible position to someone not yet encountered: performer, player, documentarian or co-creator. The expectations someone brings into a room are often already shaped by these words. Studying recruitment extends the study of a work's form to the period before its public performance.
Six players is a structural decision
The 2021 Duel Club announcement does not simply invite everyone to come and play. It calls for six performers/players, gives the audience a vote on who stays and who leaves, specifies a single winner, and schedules two or three workshop-style rehearsals. Numbers, roles, decision-making mechanisms and preparation time already form a clear structure of relationships.2
Putting the names performer and player together means that participants must both act before others and confront situations created by the rules. Audiences are also told in advance that watching will involve choosing. Whether the event actually ran this way requires examination of its records. But in the recruitment notice itself, the work has already used rules to organise how participants will depend on one another.
No technical requirement does not mean no threshold
The same notice says that professional performing skills are not required, while asking for enthusiasm and expecting applicants to attend rehearsals and discussions. This changes the form of the threshold. Assessment concerns not only existing skills, but also a commitment of time, a willingness to act and acceptance of shared rules.2
The most useful analysis of an open call is therefore not simply to declare everyone equal, but to ask who has time to attend, who understands the invitation and who can bear the pressure of acting in public. The existing notice shows how an invitation was issued. By itself, it cannot establish who applied, how selection proceeded or whether everyone had the same opportunities. Keeping these matters distinct makes openness something that can be discussed concretely.
Recruitment also arranges duration
The eight and a half parts of Real Image ask us to understand joining as an extended arrangement of time. Photographing alternates with viewing and expression, leaving an interval for reflection between encounters. Duel Club organises time through workshops, public performance and a competitive model. Both involve participation, but the kinds of commitment differ.32
The training record for Howlers on the Rooftop further shows that a person's position may change during the process. Li Chen initially observes from the side, then joins the training and writes about bodily sensations. The name offered by recruitment is not the only identity available in practice. Someone making a record may participate, and an audience member may create in a later project.4 Each such transition, however, needs to be explained through specific material.
Read announcements alongside experiences
When reading P4's recruitment archive, begin by identifying numbers, roles, time, rules and expectations. Then seek rehearsal records and post-performance texts to examine how those arrangements were fulfilled, rewritten or questioned. The word co-creation in an announcement does not establish that everyone had equal decision-making power. Nor does a result that departs from an announcement immediately establish that an experiment failed. What matters is where the departure occurred and who is able to explain it.
Recruitment then becomes more than expired event information. It preserves the commitments made before a work took place and provides a point of comparison for understanding participants' later experiences. P4's history can be reread between invitation and response: how a plan opens itself to strangers, and how it changes once actual people arrive.1
Sources and original texts
- P4 Theater, Ten Years — He Fa, 2025-03-08
2. Call for Performers/Players | Duel Club: A Real-Life Battle Royale! — Purple Action, 2021-09-25
3. What Is Real Image? — He Fa, 2020-06-21
4. Am I a Journalist? (3) | Performer Training Record for Howlers on the Rooftop — Li Chen, 2021-01-05
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/p4-recruitment-as-form/