One night only: August 31st, 2026!
@ Ornithology Jazz Club, presented by Josh Mooiweer
A short performance preceding a screening of Elaine Stritch at Liberty.
…and after that, a full length show!
Damocles, as part of Ars Nova’s ANT Fest: Wednesday, September 16th, 2026. While the performance is listed as SOLD OUT, more tickets may be added!
ABOUT US
Das Besties are Travis Amiel and Calpurnia. We create live performances exploring contradictory desires, mindfulness, and shame. Our work combines original devised material remixed with memes, contemporary dance, audio sourced from TikTok/YouTube videos, and cinema to complicate understandings of low and high brow humor, balancing our zany theatrical scope and spectacle with vulnerable and intimate moments. This interplay creates pathways to question existing frameworks of consumption, selfhood, and embarrassment as our shows jump between personal reflection, dramatized memes, lip syncs, and dance sequences. We are influenced by the grandness and intensity found in European state-theater productions, the impulse of humor as a coping mechanism, and the ingenuity of Brooklyn DIY artists and spaces.
OUR SHOWS
Das Rauschgift (2025)
Das Rauschgift is about humanity’s relationship to drug use, addiction, presence, and the ineffable passage of time. Das Rauschgift was created and performed in collaboration with Arzu Salman and Nina Lucia Rodriguez.
Das Ersatz (2024)
Premiering at The Brick Theater in 2024, Das Ersatz is an exploration on the concept of expendability, replicability, and free will. A zany theatrical experience combining electrifying dance sequences with the ancient wisdom of memes, Das Ersatz is the story of two clowns going to work, getting fired, losing friends, and making new ones. If only they’d listen to their mothers! Das Ersatz was mentioned as part of The New Yorker’s “Best Theater of 2024”.
The production is created and performed by Travis Amiel and Calpurnia, and features lighting design by Connor Sale, set design by Joe Burt, stage management by Mack Fuentes, makeup consulting by Nina Lucia Rodriguez, and illusions by Reuven Glezer.
Das Sofortvergnügen (THE INSTANT PLEASURE) [2023]
Developed at the 2021 !?: New Works Festival and premiering at the 2023 Exponential Festival, Das Sofortvergnügen (THE INSTANT PLEASURE) is a dance theater spectacle about humanity’s need for instant gratification. Refracting outward into explorations of desire, insatiability, and the inherent contradictions within ourselves, Das Sofortvergnügen (THE INSTANT PLEASURE) presents a whirlwind of missed opportunities, pillow fights, bad makeup tutorials, and odd affirmations all assembling to ask what exists beyond the constant craving to buy, spend, want, and desire.
The production was created and performed by Travis Amiel and Calpurnia, with lighting design by Travis Amiel.
