Tora Hsu | Notes from a Pause

Tora Hsu’s residency at Onassis AiR is approached as a midpoint – a pause from a long-standing, text-based directing practice to reconsider how theatrical meaning takes shape without a written script, a cast of actors, or a production deadline. Rather than creating a finished piece, the focus is on process: observing, listening, and tuning into what arises from minimal conditions.

Through attending performances, visiting rehearsals, and engaging in conversations with local artists and institutions, Hsu explores how different cultural contexts construct theater, how co-production is imagined and negotiated, and how audience relationships are shaped in response to place, history, and politics.

In parallel, he conducts a series of quiet spatial studies without actors or narrative. These small experiments use arrangement, timing, and object cues to test what a director activates when language is not the primary tool. This is not a search for form but for attention – for the conditions under which theater might still emerge, even in its absence.

It is a process of stepping aside from authorship and starting again through observation, response, and presence.