Keep the record legible
A record should say what it is, when and where it was made, who supplied it, and which work or event gives it meaning.
METHOD · PROVENANCE · PARTICIPANT MEMORY
An archive is not a neutral container.
P4’s records come from live situations in which people, authorship, conflict and memory remain entangled. The archive therefore preserves not only files, but also their sources, relations, public limits and competing accounts.
ARCHIVAL METHOD
Four working principles
The catalogue is designed for discovery, but discovery is not allowed to sever a record from the conditions in which it was made.
Preserve relations, not just files
Projects, rehearsals, calls, performances, writing, people and later responses remain connected rather than being flattened into one chronology.
Separate evidence from interpretation
Primary material, editorial description and later commentary are identified as different layers so that readers can see where a claim comes from.
Leave room for correction
Participants can add context, identify people, correct dates, contest a description or request a review of visibility and attribution.
ONE ORGANIZATION · TWO CORE ROLES
Main site and archive
Both domains describe the same P4 Theater organization. They carry different editorial tasks so that definitions, translations and source records do not compete with one another.
The main site’s P4 Theater profile defines the organization, while its Chinese experimental theater field guide supplies broader historical and terminological context. This page explains only how P4’s records are preserved and governed.
01 / P4 NETWORK
p4theater.top
Identity · concepts · edited writing
The main domain is the authority layer: what P4 Theater is, the key project and method definitions, and the maintained Chinese–English article editions.
Open 02 / P4 NETWORKa.p4theater.top
Records · sources · dates · relations
The archive subdomain is the evidence layer: project dossiers, event records, source articles, photographs, moving images, provenance and participant memory.
OpenLANGUAGE POLICY
Bilingual access without false equivalence
Translation increases access, but an archive must still distinguish a translated interface, an edited translation and an untranslated primary source.
English navigation does not rewrite the source
The interface can be English while a title, quotation, poster or testimony remains in Chinese. Source-language evidence is not silently replaced.
Edited translations live on the main site
Where a complete English article has been prepared, the archive points to the maintained edition on p4theater.top instead of publishing a competing duplicate.
Language links imply real equivalence
Chinese and English pages are paired only when they carry substantially equivalent editorial meaning. A gateway is used when a record has not yet been translated.
SOURCES · RIGHTS · CORRECTION
Public access with visible boundaries
Provenance
Source URLs, creators, dates, identifiers and project relations stay attached wherever the available evidence permits.
Public access is not ownership
A public record or access copy does not erase the rights of its creator, performer, photographer, publisher or other participant.
Visibility is reviewed
Material may be public, visible only to registered participants, retained internally, or held for further review when privacy or disputed claims are involved.
Corrections remain part of the record
A correction can change a description without pretending that earlier uncertainty, disagreement or context never existed.
ONE PRACTICE · CONNECTED PUBLIC SURFACES
The P4 digital network
These are not competing copies. Each address has a distinct reading task, while shared project names, entity links and source records keep the network connected.
MAIN SITEP4 TheaterThe authoritative public introduction to P4’s practice, concepts, lineages and full Chinese–English writing archive.PUBLIC ARCHIVERecords, sources and relationsThe site you are reading: projects, events, images, moving-image records, provenance and public access copies.FILM MEMORYHuman Surrender search memoryDialogue, roles, timecodes, stills and scene-level search for the film and performance lineage.CANON READERHuman Surrender canonA public reader for the twelve books, chapters, evidence layers and conceptual index.BOOKRecursive Reference MachineA connected research publication that extends P4’s questions through recursive reading and reference.
The archive can be amended by the people who made the history.
Add a missing source, correct a date, identify a participant, propose another account or ask for a rights and privacy review.