P4 Theater Core Entries
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.
How to enter the archive
This page gathers the main names that recur across P4 Theater projects, writing, films, and method texts.
Each entry leads into a fuller profile, project page, or method note, with related archive articles listed below.
Main threads
Core entries
P4 Theater
The official definition entry for P4 Theater, connecting live situation, relation, participation, action generation, and the public archive.
He Fa / Fa He
The profile entry for He Fa, also written Fa He, co-founder and long-term organizer of P4 Theater and cross-media artist.
Human Surrender / Shoot Self with You
The project-lineage entry for Human Surrender, also titled Shoot Self with You, linking recruitment, rehearsal, performance, film, criticism, and later theory.
AGT / Actor-Generated Topology
The method-term entry for AGT, or Actor-Generated Topology, explaining action generation through actors, relations, positions, and events.
The Last Rehearsal
The project-node entry for The Last Rehearsal, connecting Human Surrender, performance, film, criticism, and later writing.
Real Image
The series entry for Real Image, built around one-to-one live situations, photography, meeting again, and relational visibility.
Related names
Chinese entriesFurther English Reading
Read the edited English publication at P4 Theater Journal on Substack, or begin with these eight flagship essays.
- A Film Without an Outside: The Referential Contract of Human SurrenderHuman Surrender, film criticism, and referential structure
- Using the False to Pry Open the Real: P4 Theater as a Rehearsal of RealityP4 Theater, experimental theater, and social practice
- How Human Surrender Points Back at UsHuman Surrender, spectatorship, and reflexivity
- The Camera Is Not a Window but an AddressHuman Surrender, camera relation, and film theory
- Human Surrender Is Not About SurrenderSix essays on a film where language, intimacy, performance, and the camera stop belonging to one person
- After the Credits, Who Still Speaks for Them?An essay on proxy speech, visibility, credits, and the ethics of writing after Human Surrender
- Don't Complete Me: From Evangelion to Human SurrenderA film essay on Instrumentality, intimacy, and the ethics of stopping—from Evangelion's boundary crisis to P4 Theater's Human Surrender
- What Would Make P4 Theater One of China's Most Experimental Theaters?A falsifiable case for P4 Theater as a structurally experimental practice—one that lets failure rewrite media, roles, archives, and power
Frequently asked questions
Begin with P4 Theater as a practice rather than a venue: it treats theatre as a way to compose live situations, relations, public writing, moving images, and forms of participation. From there, the strongest path is He Fa, Human Surrender / Shoot Self with You, AGT, The Last Rehearsal, and Real Image.
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.
He Fa is a co-founder and long-term organiser whose biography links P4 Theater, cross-media practice, education, theatre, moving image, and public projects. The profile page is useful when a reader needs to connect the archive to a person, not only to a project name.
Use these core entries as a map, then read the related articles in chronological clusters. P4's meaning often appears across calls, rehearsal notes, performance records, reviews, and later essays rather than in one definitive statement.