From the repeated encounters of Real Image through the crew's shared film viewing to first-person accounts after Last Rehearsal, this essay considers how repetition in artistic work accumulates differences, and why one public performance cannot represent an entire process.
P4 Theater website essay · 2026-09-08
Another kind of time exists outside the schedule
An announcement can tell us on which day a public performance begins. It can hardly tell us why a group of people can act together on that day. Viewing, conversation and waiting before rehearsal, and feelings that cannot yet be articulated after an attempt, do not always fit a tidy production schedule.
Once Again supplies a concrete lead. Yun Jianhui recalls discussing Ryusuke Hamaguchi with He Fa and describes the Shoot Self with You crew's viewing and discussion of Intimacies.1 These records reveal a time of preparation in filmmaking. People prepare more than equipment and venues. They gradually develop points of reference: which pauses are worth waiting for, what ways of speaking matter to them, and how a relationship might enter an image.
Such influence cannot be reduced to stylistic inheritance. Having watched a film together does not prove that every form in a later work derives from it. It first establishes a way of working: before creation has fully become a set of executable tasks, people are already exchanging feelings and judgments.
Why might repetition produce difference?
Repetition is often mistaken for a problem of efficiency: why do the same thing again? In performance and photographic practice, however, the second occasion rarely has the conditions of the first. Participants remember what happened last time and begin to anticipate or avoid a particular moment. Their trust in one another, and their impatience, may also have changed.
What Is Real Image? distributes encounters through an extended period, alternating photographing and expression.2 A later encounter therefore faces not only a new present but also images left by the past. Photographs become part of a shared memory, and subsequent expression in turn affects how people look at a photograph.
The value of repetition cannot consequently be measured only by whether an action becomes more proficient. Sometimes proficiency makes a person freer; sometimes it lets them arrange the outcome in advance of the event. What deserves to be recorded is difference: where a once-natural action becomes stiff, which unplanned pause produces a new relationship, and whether participants notice these changes.
A one-off performance and sustained preparation do not contradict one another
The public invitation to Last Rehearsal stresses that the performance will happen only once, while also stating that it will be recorded by cameras and enter the film material.31 It therefore occupies two times at once. It is an evening that cannot recur exactly as it was, yet it will repeatedly return through later viewing of the images.
A one-off event is not necessarily unprepared. Conversely, preparation does not mean that the result has already been decided. Rehearsal offers shared vocabularies and arrangements; public performance brings that preparation into contact with new people, spaces and responses. The work's openness must be judged through the concrete way these meet, not established merely by the labels “improvisation” or “one night only”.
Awareness of this double time can change an audience's expectations. A live impasse need not immediately be treated as a technical failure, nor automatically praised as authentic. It may arise from insufficient preparation, or from existing preparation being unable to handle a new situation. Judgment depends on how the impasse is answered: is it concealed, forcibly pushed through, or does it produce a new action?
Writing after a performance preserves what has not yet been organised
Jia Rui's post-performance account describes moments when existing staging arrangements set the performance moving again, and questions outside the script that appeared towards the end.4 Here, preparation and contingency do not alternate neatly: they interweave within the same stretch of action. Existing arrangements offer a path, while unexpected speech changes how it feels to complete that path.
This text's position in time also deserves to be retained. Looking back after the performance on what has just happened, it contains definite memories alongside reactions not yet understood. Rewriting it as a creative concept already settled in retrospect would erase something important at the time: participants do not necessarily know immediately what their experience means.
A public archive needs such unfinished judgments. They allow history to contain contemporaneous hesitation rather than consist solely of retrospectives. Only by placing material from different dates alongside one another can readers see understanding take shape, instead of assuming that a work possessed today's explanation from the beginning.
How to read a continuing practice
To understand rehearsal time at P4, arrange materials by function as well as by year. Shared viewing supplies references; recruitment establishes expectations; rehearsal leaves experiments; performance meets responses; and subsequent records reinterpret experience. Their relationship is seldom a straight line of constant progress. It often returns to an earlier step.
This reading also changes the meaning of completion. Completing a performance, completing an edit and completing a recollection each close part of the work without necessarily closing understanding of the experience. Later audiences' disagreements may let makers see actions they had not previously noticed. New material can also require an existing interpretation to change.
Rehearsal time is therefore difficult to compress for more than the general reason that art requires patience. More concretely, participants must experience something once before they know what they are repeating next time. They must first leave something behind before looking back can reveal what it has not finished saying. P4's public texts make this slow process of understanding into a readable condition of the works.
The times preserved by different materials
| Material | What it helps us understand | What it cannot establish alone |
|---|---|---|
| Records of shared film viewing | How creative references were discussed | The sole origin of every formal choice |
| Performance announcements | Arrangements and expectations at the time | Everything that actually happened during the event |
| First-person accounts after performance | How one participant remembers an experience | A conclusion shared by all participants |
| Later criticism | How a work is reinterpreted | Unverified details of production |
Sources and original texts
- Shoot Self with You D | Once Again — Yun Jianhui (identified in the body text) / published by P4, 2023-08-24
2. What Is Real Image? — He Fa, 2020-06-21
3. P4 Finale | Last Rehearsal: Public Performance | Love, Death, Shoot Self with You — P4 Theater / He Fa, 2023-08-25
4. Shoot Self with You | I Disappeared — After Performing Last Rehearsal — Jia Rui (identified in the body text) / published by P4, 2023-09-02
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/rehearsal-time-and-return/