DAS ERSATZ By Cosimo Pori And Travis Amiel to be Presented at The Brick Theater

Following their 2023 Exponential Festival production Das Sofortvergnügen (THE INSTANT PLEASURE), Cosimo Pori and Travis Amiel present a new dance-theatre spectacle about substitutions, replacements, and feeling expendable: Das Ersatz.

In Das Ersatz, Amiel and Pori star as 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 Cosimo Pori, and features lighting design by Connor Sale, set design by Joe Burt, stage management by Mack Fuentes, illusions by Reuven Glezer, and Makeup Consulting by Nina Lucia Rodriguez.

 

Show Schedule:

Thu, Jun 6 at 8PM

Fri, Jun 7 at 8PM

Sat, Jun 8 at 8PM

Sun, Jun 9 at 3PM

Thu, Jun 13 at 8PM

Fri, Jun 14 at 8PM

Sat, Jun 15 at 8PM

Sun, Jun 16 at 3PM

Running Time: 75 minutes

Tickets are $20-50 and are available now. Tickets may also be purchased in-person at the theater 30 minutes prior to each performance.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Travis Amiel is a multidisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, NY creating performances, websites, games, and animations. Tinkering with different mediums in performances and online, Travis is interested in queerness, pretentiousness, shame, convenience, and commons/cooperative-based organizing. With Cosimo Pori, Travis created Das Sofortvergnügen (THE INSTANT PLEASURE) which premiered at the 2023 Exponential Festival, and Das Ersatz which will premiere at The Brick in June 2024. From 2018-2020, Travis created 13 short performances each about something in the news that had happened in the week leading up to that night for Fast and Furious, a series at The Tank. Travis has worked with HowlRound Theatre Commons, was a 2019-2020 Performance Project Fellow at University Settlement, and studied contemporary performance at Emerson College.

Joe Burt is a scenic designer, associate, and studio assistant based in Brooklyn. Recent theater credits include, as scenic designer: Holes in the Shape of My Father (Public Theater/Under The Radar); Saturday Morning Cartoons with Cereal; Summer's Soldier (Williamstown Theatre Festival). As associate scenic designer: Selling Kabul; Wish You Were Here (Playwrights Horizons); My Broken Language; The Comeuppance; Orlando (Signature Theatre); Buena Vista Social Club (Atlantic Theater Company); Exclusion (Arena Stage); Sabbath's Theater (The New Group); Cult of Love (Berkeley Repertory Theatre); The Age of Innocence (The Old Globe). As assistant scenic designer: A Strange Loop; Topdog/Underdog; Home (Broadway). BFA Emerson College. @joeburtdesign.

Mack Fuentes (he/him) is a transmasculine stage manager who loves putting together new shows like they're puzzles. He is currently the ASM of the Club Car at The McKittrick Hotel, where he has worked on Hypnotique, At The Illusionist's Table, and Sleep No More, alongside critically-acclaimed special events. A lover of introspection, comedy, and all-around shenanigans, he could not be happier to be joining the team behind Das Erstaz!

Reuven Isaiah Glezer is a Brooklyn-based director-writer and illusions designer of new and classic theatrical work. They've developed work at/with PhysFest, The Neighborhood, the Mercury Store, the Tank, the Brick, the Maker's Ensemble, Exquisite Corpse, Target Margin, and the Baruch Performing Arts Center, and have been a finalist for Pipeline PlayLab, Woven Theatre's The Loom, LABA at the 14th Street Y, Wingspace, and was briefly a corporate clown with Nightdrive. Artistic director of Sparklet (@sparkletprods). @reuvenglezer on the funny picture place (Instagram).

Cosimo Pori (they/them) is a dancer, poet, and performance artist who lives in Brooklyn. Cosimo integrates years of dance training (the outcome of being an overexcitable youngster) with the general aimless yearning endemic to queer people. Cosimo enjoys clowning around in the realm of interdisciplinary performance art with specific attention to themes of alienation, contradictory desires, impulse control, privacy, and the internet. Cosimo is a graduate of The New Mexico School for the Arts where they trained in Horton and Balanchine techniques and is a graduate of The New School for Public Engagement. Cosimo collaborates extensively with Travis Amiel, creating Das Sofortvergnügen (THE INSTANT PLEASURE) at the 2023 Exponential Festival and the forthcoming Das Ersatz, premiering at The Brick in June 2024. Their favorite food is ravioli and they believe in ghosts.

Connor Sale is a New York based lighting designer and the Resident Lighting Designer at Triskelion Arts. Recent projects include ENUF (Triskelion Arts), The Suite (Triskelion Arts), The Living Room Project (PSNY), The Dybbuk Part Two, or Still Between Two Worlds (Triskelion Arts), Helen (La Mama), Julia Antinozzi's double bill (PAGEANT), the body || dust (Gibney), Earth Temple (with Nocturnal Medicine at SMUSH Gallery), and Sea Change (Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago). He tours internationally with the Akram Khan Company and with the production of Pina Bausch's The Rite of Spring that Sadler's Wells and École des Sables is producing. He's interested in using the temporary nature of light to make people more active in space. More of his work can be found at connorsale.com and at @connorsalelight.

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