Animal Farm

Rules is a theatrical experiment that combines game mechanics, live scoring, and immersive audience interaction.

Audiences enter what appears to be a simple classroom. Each person is assigned a seat number. Rules and ranking boards line the walls. The session unfolds according to the bell. Strong performance earns a circle; falling behind earns a cross.
No one gives loud commands. No single authority figure is visible. Yet the lists keep updating, positions keep shifting.

When safety can be accumulated—and transferred—when staying becomes the only objective, participants begin to observe one another, calibrate their behavior, and eventually carry out the system’s eliminations themselves.

Inspired by George Orwell’s Animal Farm and Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, Rules does not retell a story. Instead, it confronts structures of control and the obsession with productivity embedded in many Asian societies. Through minimal language and ritualized acts of labor, the work reveals how power infiltrates sound, movement, and silence.

The audience is not a passive observer. Every choice—and every silence—is absorbed into the live system, shaping the outcomes of others.

When completion no longer guarantees safety, when even first place can be removed, what will you choose?
To compete, to trade, to align yourself with others—or to remain deliberately average?

In this system, we learn to obey in order to survive.
And to be allowed to stay, we learn how to exclude.

Audience participation is required.
By entering the classroom, you agree to take part in the rules, the scoring, and the collective consequences they produce.