# Using the False to Pry Open the Real 本文为研究档案公开版，保留来源版本的论述与限制。公开时间：2026-09-07；不表示已完成同行评审。 来源版本日期：2026-07-14 证据边界：This is a normative, self-auditing public theory essay. It does not prove that P4 has already achieved shared rule-making, redistributed power, material withdrawal, or institutional change. Project-specific claims about authorization, versions, production, labor, rights, archives, relationships, and effects require protocols, production records, affected participants’ accounts, and other project-level evidence. # Using the False to Pry Open the Real ## P4 Theater as a Rehearsal of Reality

By He Fa

We have finally found a set of words adequate to re-examine P4’s many years of practice. They are not a theoretical medal, but a measure that turns back on us and demands an account of power, materials, and consequences.

In *Human Surrender* (*Shoot Self with You*), someone says, “Skip,” yet what is skipped does not disappear. Someone asks, “Who wants to come up?” and the audience’s position is no longer secure. One person says, “I wasn’t thinking of anything,” and another voice immediately asks, “Do you need me to say it for you?” With both camera and audience present, a figure says, “No one can see you.” These lines do more than describe the live scene. They alter who can keep going, who may speak for someone else, who becomes visible, and who has the power to handle another person’s silence. A performance can announce its end, but relations do not disperse on schedule. The images remain. Editing continues to rearrange cause and effect. Names enter the credits, and people who come later continue to watch. Some words have already been spoken; some bodies have already borne pressure; some refusals have already been preserved by the camera. The real questions therefore arrive after the work: To whom do these consequences belong? Who may interpret them? Who may write them into the next round of creation? And who has the right to let them stop here? Looking back over P4’s years of rehearsal, filming, and writing, we encounter these questions again and again. We have described our work through experimental theater, participatory creation, reflexive images, and recursive media. Each term captured one part, but none made the same underlying matter clear: what, exactly, has P4 been trying to change in reality? We now call this work a **rehearsal of reality**. ![Performers, spectators, stage surfaces, and the camera share one live field in Human Surrender.](/research/images/b421f8f0ce9178b2468c.webp) *Performers, spectators, stage surfaces, and the camera share one live field. Film still from* Human Surrender / Shoot Self with You. ## I. Where Art Enters Reality Theater can, of course, represent reality. Poverty, anxiety, identity, intimacy, and generational conflict can all be written into dialogue and characters, and spectators may see something they had not seen before. But when reality enters art only as content, it is easily enclosed a second time inside the work: the stage presents the problem, the audience understands it, and those who control resources and decisions remain where they were. P4 is concerned with another point of entry. An artificially constructed scene, a rule that does not exist in everyday life, a temporary role, or a camera entering a relationship can alter what people on site are actually able to do. Someone acquires the authority to give a command. Someone is able to refuse for the first time. A previously secure directorial position is challenged. A spectator may be pushed into the position of an actor. Fiction is no longer merely the content of the work; it becomes a temporary condition of reality. A rehearsal of reality is precisely this kind of practice: participants know that the situation has been deliberately constructed and nevertheless act within it for a time; fiction rearranges roles, rules, and positions of viewing on site, and the bodily responses, changes in relationship, and material consequences it produces cannot all be cancelled by saying, “We were only acting.” The concept itself deserves no celebration. Corporate crisis simulations, military exercises, reality television, and psychological experiments can also use fictive conditions to produce real consequences. A rehearsal of reality names only a way of working; it does not automatically prove that the work is free, equal, or progressive. If P4 wants the term to carry political meaning, it must still answer how consequences are distributed, whether the conditions can be changed, and whether those who set the conditions are willing to surrender some of their monopoly over the event. ## II. The False, the Real, the Lever “Using the false to pry open the real” can easily sound like a game of truth and falsehood: the artist sets a trap, participants take it for reality, and the camera waits for their true nature to show; or a film deliberately confuses documentary and fiction, inviting the audience to guess which passage can be trusted. Such tricks are far removed from what we mean. Here, “the false” is a publicly acknowledged “as if.” Everyone knows that the role is temporary, the rule has been devised, and the scene has been organized, yet they agree to act accordingly for a limited period. Theater can give the authority to issue commands to someone who ordinarily has none. It can let an institution that does not yet exist begin to operate in advance. It can make the camera stop pretending to be transparent and enter the site as a position with weight and direction, one that alters relationships. Fiction draws its power from this substitution of conditions, not from deception. The fictional premise may be false; authorization, harm, payment, and responsibility for the material cannot be. If participants do not know what will be recorded, how it will be edited, to whom it will be shown, how long it will be kept, or whether they can leave, then “artistic fiction” is merely a better-sounding alibi. Nor should “the real” continue to mean a person’s inner essence. When someone falls silent, becomes angry, complies, or even loses control under fatigue, conflict, prolonged filming, or public observation, this first shows that the conditions have acted on a body. It does not prove that the artist has finally discovered who this person truly is. An apparatus that produces a response does not thereby gain the right to authenticate a soul. Once exhaustion is written as authenticity and breakdown as insight, the pressure created by art is decorated in retrospect as artistic achievement. What we call “real” is the reality of consequences. A fictional relationship really does alter how two people later relate to each other. A shoot really does move someone’s position within a group. A sentence uttered under a temporary identity really does create responsibility. Once released, an image really does enter someone’s life. None of these changes can be easily revoked by saying, “We were acting at the time.” **The real is not a secret that the camera excavates from the human heart. The real is a consequence that cannot be revoked by saying, “It was only a performance.”** Nor does “prying” mean tearing away an illusion. Much of reality is not a completed truth waiting for the artist to discover it. It is continually produced through the coordination of rules, roles, resources, watching, and interpretation. Fiction is the lever; existing relations of power are the fulcrum. Whether the lever works depends on whether capacities to act, decision-making power, and people’s positions relative to the material have actually moved. If conflict merely makes the work more exciting and the theory more complete while those who set the conditions retain their original power, the site may have been shaken, but the structure has not moved. ## III. The Smallest Unit of Reality “Transforming the world” is often stated on too grand a scale. Once the world appears only as a vast noun, art can easily substitute one moving moment, one burst of circulation, or one sensation for actual change. P4 needs to bring the claim back to a scale that can be examined. Reality exists in a set of concrete conditions of action: who may begin and who must answer; who is entitled to ask and who is always answering; who controls space, time, equipment, and payment; who holds the camera and who has final-cut authority; who may leave and whose exit carries an extra cost; who bears the risks of exposure and broken relationships, and who receives the work, reputation, income, and theoretical gains. The politics of art must also be judged here. A work may discuss power without moving power within its own production. It may invite many people to appear without giving them the capacity to decide the work’s direction. Calling a spectator onto the stage proves only that the position of viewing has been disturbed; it does not prove that the spectator has also gained the right to change the rules, refuse the use of an image, or close the loop. The smallest form in which art can change the world is to change the conditions under which certain actions become possible. A person who previously could not refuse gains a right to refuse without penalty. Someone who could only be filmed begins to participate in decisions about the shot and the version. One person’s silence is no longer automatically handed to someone else to interpret. Such changes are small, but they come closer to reality than “raising awareness.” ## IV. Can Consequences Rewrite the Rules? After an event, a work learns. The camera captures a reaction; editing arranges its meaning; commentary and dispute enter theory; the next work matures as a result. Feedback is certainly present, and perhaps even recursion. But feedback is not inherently political. Platforms collect people’s responses every day and use those responses to optimize their systems. What P4 needs to examine is whether consequences can modify the rules that produced them. We call this step **condition write-back**. Suppose a participant objects to the way filming is conducted. If the objection is edited into the film as proof that the work dares to criticize itself while the filming protocol remains unchanged, the system has merely absorbed another critique. If the objection leads the next round to add procedures for pausing and stopping the event; if participation, recording, publication, and archiving are no longer bundled into a single authorization; if the affected person can request that particular material be re-edited, obscured, or sealed—then the consequence has entered the rules. A director being challenged does not mean directorial authority has been dispersed. An artist can arrange resistance into the most exciting passage and still retain control over interpretation, version, publication, and archive. Real change begins when the challenge becomes binding: when it can alter who decides the next step, who approves the final version, who can veto publication, and who can make the project lose part of its material. When people change themselves according to the rules, that is training. When a system adjusts its methods in response to people, that is feedback. When conflict changes the rules of the next round, conditions begin to write back. When those who bear the consequences acquire the capacity to constrain the rules, politics truly enters the site. This does not require the director to disappear. The initiator must still take responsibility for constructing the situation, securing resources, performing care work, and taking responsibility for consequences. Nor does shared decision-making mean that everyone has identical authority over everything. What must change is the unspoken natural sovereignty concentrated in one person: the right to begin, to hold the camera, to make the final cut, to name, to publish, to archive, and to end must all become speakable, contestable, and redistributable within a specific project. ## V. P4, Too, Can Become a Small Platform The society we inhabit is already full of loops. Platforms record clicks, dwell time, anger, and purchases, then turn them into the conditions of the next recommendation. Workers adjust themselves to evaluation systems, and those systems learn from their adjustments. Users hand over everyday life, relationships, and emotions; platforms convert them into data, traffic, and models. The system keeps updating, but the rules do not thereby pass to the people who provide the feedback. P4 must submit to the same interrogation. If participants provide bodies, lives, conflict, failure, and dissent while P4 acquires images, works, methods, reputation, and theory—and participants can only continue adapting to new creative arrangements—then the difference between P4 and a platform is merely one of scale and technology. P4 may be open and may permit resistance, yet all experience can still flow toward a single center. Critique can even become premium fuel. The more participants resist, the more complex the work becomes. The sharper the ethical challenge, the more complete the theory. The harder it is to leave, the easier it becomes for the artist to describe that difficulty as proof that the work has touched the boundary of the real. If critique only strengthens P4’s capacity to explain itself, it is merely a system upgrade. Only when critique changes protocols, permissions, and the fate of the material does it enter reality. A platform learns from people without allowing them to decide what the platform should learn, what it should forget, or when it should stop learning. Radical art must reverse this direction: those drawn into the work must be able not only to affect its content, but also to constrain the way it acquires experience. They must not merely share the stage; they must participate in decisions about recording, interpretation, circulation, and closure. ![P4 Theater’s Beijing space seen from above.](/research/images/fa02e346a37eec31418e.webp) *P4 Theater’s Beijing space seen from above. Space, equipment, access, and circulation are among the conditions a practice must organize.* ## VI. Refusal Must Make the Work Lose Something Reflexive art can absorb almost anything. Cooperation can become part of the work, but so can resistance. Silence can be psychologized, and withdrawal can be narrated as the moment when the apparatus finally revealed its boundary. The system is therefore always right, because every outcome can be used as proof that it worked. **An artistic apparatus that cannot be refused is not very different from the platform it criticizes.** A rehearsal of reality must recognize **the right not to be made into a work**. This right does not require everyone to erase their memories, nor does it allow anyone to evade responsibility for actual consequences merely by saying so. It limits an art institution’s continued use of a person. Participants may require that particular words or actions, bodily states, private relationships, silences, refusals, or withdrawals not enter the final work or its promotion, not be used as evidence that a theory is valid, and not be preserved in a long-term identifiable archive. Most importantly, refusal cannot be automatically translated into the work’s meaning. If a person says “no” and the work still obtains that “no” without losing anything, then the person never truly had the power to refuse. Only when refusal may close the camera, reduce the material, alter the version, or even prevent the work from being completed as planned does power actually enter the creative process. Withdrawal does not occur only at the moment someone leaves the site. Participation, recording, editing, publication, and archiving should be authorized separately. Withdrawing future uses of material should take concrete form in obscuring, deletion, sealing, or an end to further circulation. Withdrawal cannot reverse time, but it can stop a system from continuing to possess. Fiction may run out of control. The boundaries of rights cannot disappear. ## VII. From a Work to an Institutional Rehearsal A rehearsal of reality enters a larger social context not by exaggerating one performance into a revolution. It places a small section of social rules into actual operation and lets another kind of relationship happen once in advance: who makes the rules, who can speak, who controls the material, who performs the work of maintenance, and who may refuse. These arrangements are no longer ideals merely expressed by the work; they become working rules that the production site must actually implement. P4 must therefore care about conflict in front of the audience and about the labor that sustains it over time. Who maintains the space? Who bears the cost of equipment and transport? Who coordinates, films, produces subtitles, handles post-performance communication, and cleans and organizes the archive? How are payment, credit, copyright, and income distributed? Who continues to hold the relationship after the project ends? These seemingly backstage questions determine who actually supports a so-called common practice and where its value remains. A short rehearsal cannot directly prove that a social institution has changed. Changes in perception, action, relationship, procedure, and resource distribution carry different weight. Nor can changes occurring on site, in post-production, in the next project, or within a long-term organization all be folded into the phrase “it had an impact.” P4 must state honestly where a change holds, how long it lasts, who benefits, where it fails, and whether it transfers new costs onto those with less power. ![P4 Theater’s black-box stage.](/research/images/ca0f6d74904363077caf.webp) *P4 Theater’s black-box stage. The essay asks what rules, labor, and rights must sustain what happens in front of spectators.* To be radical is not to apply greater pressure, expose more, or take greater formal risks. The truly difficult moment comes when consequences produced by art begin to limit art’s own power. ## VIII. A Measure, Not a Medal We can now describe more precisely the method toward which P4’s years of practice have pointed. P4 uses openly constructed fictional situations to rearrange roles, power, relationships, and positions of viewing for a time, allowing actions suppressed by the everyday order a chance to occur. Real bodies produce responses that cannot be fully scripted in advance, while filming, review, editing, and the archive carry these consequences into another time. This loop is not automatically political. Whether those who bear the consequences can participate in interpretation; whether they can constrain the fate of the material; whether dissent changes the rules of the next round; whether people have the ability to leave, not to be made into a work, and to close the loop—these questions determine whether the theater is producing a shared reality or merely improving its extractive techniques. A “rehearsal of reality” is therefore not a title that P4 awards itself. It is a measure with which to audit every project. Every future practice must answer: What conditions were set at the beginning? What unscripted events occurred? Who held interpretive authority? Which rule changed as a result? Who gained or lost rights? Where did materials, income, and risk flow? Which refusal truly remained outside the work? Did any change enter the next round? Using the false to pry open the real does not mean using deception to force out human nature, nor does it mean using fiction to prove that reality is false. It means building a situation in which relations of force within reality are displaced, in which an action that previously had no place can happen once, and then allowing the consequences of that action to enter the remaking of rules, rights, and relationships. What P4 needs to pry open is not a truth hidden behind appearances. What we need to pry open is this: who has the right to decide what counts as reality, who has the right to organize reality, and who has the right to write what has already happened into the conditions of the next reality. --- **[Watch *Human Surrender / Shoot Self with You*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1riPOyQuCI)** **[Read the first essay: *A Film Without an Outside*](https://p4theater.substack.com/p/a-film-without-an-outside-the-referential)** **[Explore P4 Theater](https://p4theater.top/en/)** _Public evidence note: this essay proposes a measure for auditing P4’s practice; it does not certify that shared rule-making, power redistribution, material withdrawal, or institutional change has already been achieved in any particular project. Its film dialogue functions as a scene entrance and does not by itself settle off-screen identity, psychology, authorization, coercion, harm, relationships, or responsibility._