“A whirl of sweaty, campy, poignant yearning […] a sweet, jittery Gen-Z pastiche, a postmodern pantomime that splatters the walls with swooning angst.” — Sara Holdren, Vulture

Premiering at The Brick Theater in June 2024 and mentioned in The New Yorker’s “Best Theatre of 2024“, Das Ersatz was a zany theatrical experience about replacements and substitutions. The show follows two run-of-the-mill clowns going to work, getting fired, losing friends, and making new ones. They just want to do their best, but they fail every time! It feels like everything is replaceable, them most of all. But is everything truly expendable or is expendability the essence of being alive?

Das Ersatz combines electrifying dance sequences with the ancient wisdom of memes as our (un)loveable clowns embody their dizzyingly contradictory desires…if only they’d listen to their mothers! A prismatic assemblage of Bob Fosse, Vaporwave, and Pina Bausch, among many others; Das Ersatz exists at the intersection of tofu, margarine, and immaterial labor. Through Amiel and Pori’s unique blend of misquoted pop culture and queer 😜 dance theatre, Das Ersatz challenges the binary of free will and determinism: for you can always make a change if you know that you’re terrible…but what if you just don’t know how terrible you’ve become?

Are we living in the best of times or the blurst of times?

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.