The Brooklyn Rail

Picture this: you’re dropped from a helicopter into Brooklyn’s experimental theater scene in 2023. To be more specific, you’re sitting at a (now closed) space in Gowanus to see the buzzy premiere of Das Sofortvergnügen created by and starring Travis Amiel and Cosimo Pori. Cut to only two years later. Amiel and Pori are premiering their third evening-length work, Das Rauschgift, under their moniker, Das Besties, and they persist as community leaders in how artists in the Brooklyn scene can operate in a post-post-post world. This new show, for the first time, brings in two new performers, Nina Lucia Rodriguez and Arzu Salman; circles around themes of friendship with regards to going-out/rave culture; and, as with previous ones, is told in vignette-style episodes. I had the opportunity to chat process with Amiel and Pori amidst their final week of rehearsals.

Matthew Antoci (Rail): Who the heck are you?

Cosimo Pori: I’m Cosimo Pori, and I’m one half of Das Besties with my collaborator—

Travis Amiel: I’m Travis Amiel, the other half of Das Besties. We make evening-length dance-theater spectacles. We integrate text, memes, high and lowbrow esoteric references, and are just trying to make things that are entertaining. Das Rauschgift is the third show we’ve made that circles around a specific theme, but we often come back to loneliness, dissatisfaction, horniness, romance, and the lack thereof. The big thing that we always get delighted by is contradictions.

Rail: I’m really curious about how you come up with these themes, and how cohesive they are across your shows. In my mind, you’re in a room talking about your lives, and then something emerges. Or do you have a long list of German words to tackle?

Pori: I think it’s both.

Amiel: I was thinking about the next show before we did Das Ersatz at The Brick Theater. At the time, we were ramping up on going out every weekend and partying. I was also talking about addiction a lot, and the contradiction of taking a drug to make yourself more sensitive, but also to make yourself apathetic.

Pori: Also, if you take a drug that you love wrong, it can ruin your entire evening or put you in an even worse place in an effort to escape. We eventually found the fabulous German word rauschgift, which means—

Amiel: A narcotic medication but also a poison.

Pori: Just for the record, we are aware that the title is not grammatically correct, and that’s sort of the point.

Rail: You say somewhere that you’re Pina Bausch meets SpongeBob, which is just incredibly rigorous stupidity, which is something we all really love.

Pori: Amen.

Rail: I want to hear about what you’d do on a trip to Berlin later.

“Das Besties.” This is the first show under that name, and you described it as a duo. I’m curious how “Besties” mutates across a group of four performers. Are they all besties?

Amiel: With this project, because I have been friends with Nina for a while, and Cosimo worked with Arzu at a soap store years ago, it wasn’t just two friends anymore. We had to explore and define what the relationship was between all of us, and that informed the content.

Pori: Now that there are four of us, we’re writing scenes together in a writers’ room, being like, “Okay, you say this, then I say that.” The core is still the same. I want a scene that covers a topic or a phenomenon, so I say, “Can you write something and then present it to the class?”

Rail: I saw scrapbooking on someone’s Instagram story?

Amiel: Oh, I posted that.

Rail: I’m curious about whether you think the word “collage” applies to your work. Can you speak to the motivating factors of how you choose what gets set next to what, and—if anything—what you want us to gain from the space in between vignettes?

Amiel: If I had a physical space to work in, the collaging would be all physical, but instead it’s maintained in a digital gallery. We collect images, audio, and videos. Scrapbooking is fun because you look through all these different things and find something from a year ago, from yesterday, and realize they go perfectly together. Printing it out and cutting it up lets you randomly put together one line about tofu next to a line about feet.

Pori: The word I always think of is “remixing.” I remember in Das Sofortvergnügen, we had this leapfrog section and struggled to figure out what song to use. We found this video on YouTube of a spinning, 3D polar bear, and the song was so cute that we were like, “Perfect.” The collage element gives us an opportunity to echo that contradiction. How do you mix a piece of choreography from a ballet with a weird experimental techno song?

Amiel: The way we talk every day is by responding with a reference to a TV show, song, or screenshot. That habit creates the impulse for these scripts to be this way, because that is what I want to express.

Rail: I love how you workshopped this show: that you workshopped the text in one showing and then the movement in another. Have you done that before? How’d it inform the piece?

Pori: At this point, every show we make has two in-process showings. A big part of that has to do with wanting to know what works. It’s nice to get in front of an audience and be like, “Oh, I did not think that was funny at all, but people laughed.” I think it would feel wrong to not workshop at least twice before we premiere. I want to know what gets people going.

Amiel: I apply to every opportunity that feels useful, both as a forcing function to meet a deadline and to test big swing ideas. For this show, we wanted to use an overhead projector, and I needed to test whether it would actually work with the concept. The workshops are also useful for figuring out beginnings and endings.

Rail: You talk about laughter. Is that the ideal way that people will respond to your work? Do you care?

Pori: We were just talking about this last night. I do want people to laugh, but I also love making people cry. More than either of those, I want people to leave feeling like they are thinking about their life differently, or noticing the world in a new way, or remembering something they had not thought about in a while. But laughter is really important, especially in theater.

Amiel: Yes, I love to make people laugh. Another feeling is a sense of awe or wonder.

Pori: Ooh, yeah. Like, “How did they do that!?”