Zahra Mohseni is a theatre artist and writer from Iran. Zahra explores in-betweens of process and end result, theatre and performance, and, in a repetitive form, she invites the audiences to step into the multiplicity of the unknown. 

Curtain calls. This is the end of the show. And, beginning of another. Death is not fixity. Death is equality; everything gets to rot, it’s a generous system after all. that much we know. Salt is both life and death. And it’s so satisfying— that everybody knows what they’re doing, because they are following the script. Table is the stage. The painter, the chef and I are locked in the desire for a masterpiece; the author goes in and comes back, but the decision is mine: to devour or to destroy. A scene unfolds: one character stands before “The Descent from the Cross” by Van der Weyden, the other one tastes a Tomahawk steak. They talk about palettes and experiments, depth and taste. Salvation meets Salivation. Masterpiece is a retro idea but to look back is not to reject moving forward. By the end, there’s blood, paint, cum, and either silence or chaos. The author is dead, wrapped in a plastic bag in 80 degrees water.

Cooking is the one human interaction that cannot be replicated worthily. That's why we eat. And yet, everyone must take a shit, at least once a week. Shit is the great unifier. Maybe that’s the only truth of power— It always comes back to the body. Masterpiece is death. Power is killing. Closure is elusive. But I’m good at faking it. Curtain falls. This is the end of a show. And yet, another one begins. “The Excluded Middle”, delves into writing, food, painting, and the power hidden in the word masterpiece, and it takes the audience on a journey from what they can not see to what they can eat.

“A dream is this. I perceive objects and there is nothing there. I see men; I seem to speak to them and I hear what they answer; there is no one there and I have not spoken(…) How does this happen?”*

Despite the human effort to hack time into measurable bite-sized pieces, lived experience remains in continuous flow. Our identities are mutable, not only in dreams but at each turn of the day too: one returns changed, aged, altered.

“Welcome to my masterpiece”, Mohseni’s narrator will say at the beginning of The Excluded Middle. The audience will have taken a seat to watch a runway - a liminal space - on which the narrator is about to relentlessly walk through portals that don’t provide passage from reality into illusion - from lived time to dream time - but instead sew different chapters of a dream with confident stitches. This will not be a theatre either. It will be a site of nourishment and sacrifice, sustenance and transgression. There won’t be any appetizers, main courses, or desserts. Alongside the audience and the narrator, there will be two men. One a painter and the other a chef. The painter might be looking for inspiration in the chef’s kitchen that can give him a painting and the chef could be anxious to see what it might amount to. The act of looking and being looked at, of desiring and being desired, will fuel a fire between the painter and the chef, who seek to consume and immortalize one another in their respective mediums. Portals will be crossed, and after each exit, the narrator will be shedding her limbs, her organs, as she inches forward in the story - flying towards a sun as she melts - and will be left, scene after scene, with less body than she started with. What will such self-shedding bring? An understanding of the tightly-knit relationship between creation and destruction, and how it necessitates a loss of self.

Repeatedly, tragicomic things will happen. Taking a pause to come up with the best possible line the narrator can utter at the moment when she’s been accosted by a waiter, who designates her “the writer” of this story, arrogantly waiting on her to chart the course she will end up only being able to deliver: “ a gin martini for me”. Of all the things she can be (a queen, a beggar, a singer, a waiter), she will choose, again and again, to be the writer, even if this means leaving a foot or a tongue behind. The collapse of her body will be needed to advance the story: this is what the sacrifice of making a masterpiece entails. In an allegorical volta, the story of the painter and the chef will turn into the battle of her, the writer, with her characters. They will observe her; they will express disappointment towards her. Each portal anew will take her to an arena where she will be faced with a machismo that won’t shy away from making proclamations that border on mansplaining. At some point she will ask herself: “Am I in a conference?”

In The Hatred of Poetry, Ben Lerner tells the story of Caedmon, a cowherd who, unable to sing, retreats to a stable where God appears in his dream and commands him to sing. In the dream, beautiful verses flow from him, but upon waking, he finds his song lacking the same beauty. Lerner writes, "In a dream your verses can defeat time... but when you wake, you're back in the human world with its inflexible laws and logic."** The poet, therefore, is a tragic figure, but that couldn’t be the narrator of The Excluded Middle. She does not have any desire to return from her portals in order to tell the tale to her audience; they are simply complicit in their witnessing of her mutilation. Even when the language ceases, (at some point she will confess that she doesn’t know how the story should continue: “because I have written only until this”), the story will continue writing itself.

As she loses parts of her body and becomes “less”, she will be lighter, unshackled by the illusory nature of her identity and thus might come nearer to a certain degree of control. In the end, the narrator's dissolution into the very fabric of her own words might mirror her failure of achieving a complete, unified self, but instead might show what it is to make art, to obsess. The audience then might understand that the true masterpiece is not an outcome, but the ongoing negotiation of desire.

The portal might be a condition that has been set just right, each time the same, to focus fully on a method, over and over again, in order to eliminate any and all variables. The audience might be taught its ways, at the end, and when the curtain drops, feel ready to go through it: through the door from which they came.

By Artun Alaska Arasli 

* Henri Bergson, Dreams, 1914, translated by Edwin. E. Slosson, The Independent,  p.15
** Ben Lerner, The Hatred of Poetry, Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2016, p.8

Concept, text and direction: Zahra Mohseni 
Performers: Zahra Mohseni, Antti Uimonen, Tom Krechting,
Assistant: Fred Raposo

Choreography adviser: Ainoha Hernandez Escudero
Light adviser: Mirko Lazovic      
Maquette: Monika Noak

External advisors: Joachim Robbrecht, Julian Hetzel, Artun Alaska Arasli     
Tutors: Marta Keil and Samah Hijawi

Outside eye: Keyvan Sarreshteh

Thanks to: Aitana Cordero and Ira Brand, Tiana Hemlock-Yensen, Fariborz Karimi, Pepe, Miguel Melgares, Peteris Viksna, Mohammad Rezaee Rad, Amir Mohammad Mohaddesi, ChatGPT, the DAS Theatre team, my peers and my mom

Made possible with a financial contribution from the ATD-Aart Janszen Fund

In memory of Jalileh Heibatan