# Decision-Making in Collective Creation: Who Proposes, Who Changes Things, Who Brings Them to an End?
Reading P4's recruitment notices, audience voting and post-performance criticism together, this essay distinguishes participation, selection, revision and final editing. How specifically must collective creation be described for the actual division of work to become visible?
P4 Theater website essay · 2026-09-08
## “We do it together” does not yet explain how
Saying in an event introduction that everyone creates the work together can mean many different things. Some contribute stories, some carry out actions, some choose what happens next, and some organise the material into a final version. All this labour matters, but the scope of decision-making is not the same for each.
P4's public material offers several forms of participation. The *Duel Club* call distinguishes players from voting spectators. *Real Image* links photographing with subsequent expression. *Last Rehearsal* invites audiences into the event and announces that its recording will become film material.[1](#duel)[2](#real)[3](#last) Together, these show that participation is not one fixed mechanism but a set of concrete arrangements with different conditions.
This also cautions against overly broad promises in website writing. Rather than declaring that all participants become authors, explain what they do, what they can change and which decisions remain with the organisers. A clear division of work does not weaken collective creation. It makes contributions often overlooked in collaboration easier to see.
## Choosing among options and changing the options themselves
Voting is a clear act of participation: spectators choose, and the result affects the event's course. But the ability to vote is not the ability to decide what the vote concerns, how votes are counted or how rules can be revised when they do not fit. The arrangement of players and spectators in *Duel Club*'s public call provides a starting point for distinguishing these levels.[1](#duel)
The first level is entering the event; the second is choosing among existing options; the third is proposing new options; the fourth is changing the rules that produce the options. A work need not open every level at once, but introductions and criticism should explain how far the opening extends. Otherwise, a small amount of choice can easily be inflated into complete shared decision-making.
The same distinction applies to photography. Being able to speak freely offers a space for expression. Being able to discuss photographs offers a space for interpretation. Having one's views affect which photographs are made public reaches further into decisions about presentation. These stages may support one another, but cannot substitute for one another. Distinguishing them when reading *Real Image* comes closer to its actual design than simply calling it interactive photography.[2](#real)
## Why temporary rules need particular people to take responsibility
Rules do not begin to work by themselves once written in an announcement. An event will bring situations not explained in advance: someone understands differently, wants to change the rhythm or cannot continue the planned action. Who decides what happens next can then reveal more about the work's organisation than the written rule itself.
In *I Disappeared*, Jia Rui recalls an interweaving of impasses, forward movement, established staging and questions outside the script.[4](#after) This first-person account is not a complete event record. It nevertheless reminds us that decisions within collective creation often occur through improvised responses. They need not take the form of a formal vote; they can lie in an urging phrase, someone making room or an action that starts things again.
Studying collaboration therefore requires more than identifying who holds a title. It requires observing who proposes an executable next step at a crucial moment and how others accept, alter or refuse it. This makes organisational labour concrete and avoids attributing every change in an event to one author's advance design.
## Is room left for a response after criticism?
The *Iceberg* material preserves both audience criticism and a post-performance editorial. The spectator judges the text, performance and work, while the editorial sharply asks how audiences use their capacity to criticise.[5](#icecrit)[6](#iceafter) Placing the two together reveals tensions that persist after speech is opened up. Allowing criticism does not mean it will be welcomed; voicing criticism does not guarantee that it is already specific or sufficient.
The conflict should not hastily be made into evidence of the project's progress. Existing texts show that opinions were expressed and how they were answered. They cannot establish on their own which revisions were adopted in subsequent production. Changes to rehearsal, text or event rules require further material; criticism cannot fill in those facts on their behalf.
What these materials can teach is how to describe a response more clearly. Does an opinion concern an identifiable passage? Which point does the maker answer? Which disagreements remain? Criticism can then become a discussion readers can continue entering, rather than merely a collision of positions and emotions.
## The final version still needs an account of who organises it
When a live event becomes a film, article or archive, decision-making changes again. Someone who altered the course of an event did not necessarily also participate in its final edit. Preserving a first-person account publicly does not mean it uses the same editorial method as a website essay.
Collective creation therefore needs, at minimum, to describe both contribution and editing. Contribution explains where material and actions come from; editing explains how they are ordered, interpreted and made public. With both clear, authorial responsibility and collective labour need not obscure one another. We can acknowledge that someone bears responsibility for the final form while also recognising its dependence on work that no single credit can encompass.
From P4's existing material, the strongest way to write about the collective is to show how decisions actually happen: who proposes an action, who changes it, who bears its duration and who recounts it afterwards. Such a description does not hurry to prove that an ideal relationship has been achieved. It supplies genuinely comparable material for understanding collaboration.
## Four levels of shared decision-making
Level of participation | Concrete action | What cannot be directly concluded
--- | --- | ---
Entering | Attending, contributing material or performing | Everyone present has final editing authority
Choosing | Voting among existing options | Voters can rewrite the voting rules
Revising | Proposing new options or adjusting the process | Every stage is jointly decided in the same way
Editing | Organising the final version and form of publication | Other people's contributions to the live event can be disregarded
## Sources and original texts
1. [Call for Performers/Players | Duel Club: A Real-Life Battle Royale!](https://p4theater.cn/articles/2021/2021-09-25-演员-玩家招募-决斗俱乐部-现实版的-大逃杀-游戏-84227be0e4/) — Purple Action, 2021-09-25
2. [What Is Real Image?](https://p4theater.cn/articles/2020/2020-06-21-何为实像-bdbdd4669a/) — He Fa, 2020-06-21
3. [P4 Finale | Last Rehearsal: Public Performance | Love, Death, Shoot Self with You](https://p4theater.cn/articles/2023/2023-08-25-p4终章-最后的排练公演-爱-死亡-人类投降派-7fc3f2ef15/) — P4 Theater / He Fa, 2023-08-25
4. [Shoot Self with You | I Disappeared — After Performing Last Rehearsal](https://p4theater.cn/articles/2023/2023-09-02-人类投降派-我消失了-在演完-最后的排练-之后-50a18864f8/) — Jia Rui (identified in the body text) / published by P4, 2023-09-02
5. [Audience Criticism | Spectator No. 15 on Iceberg](https://p4theater.cn/articles/2022/2022-01-06-观众批评-15号观众对-冰山-的批评-04f9b15338/) — P4 Theater and You, 2022-01-06
6. [North Wind Editorial | North Wind’s Address After Performing Iceberg](https://p4theater.cn/articles/2022/2022-01-06-北风社论-北风致辞-在演完-冰山-后-4d6d0b38e1/) — P4 Theater and You, 2022-01-06
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/participation-and-decision/