Das Besties/ Travis Amiel, Cosimo Pori, Arzu Salman, and Nina Lucia Rodriguez

Das Besties – Cosimo Pori and Travis Amiel – 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.

Their show Das Sofortvergnügen (The Instant Pleasure) premiered as a part of the 2023 Exponential Festival, and ran in the 2023 Philadelphia Fringe Festival. Their next show, Das Ersatz, premiered at The Brick in June 2024. Their shows have been covered in IntoMore, Vulture, the New York Times, and included in The New Yorker’s Best Theater of 2024.

Das Rauschgift
Das Besties will present an excerpt from Das Rauschgift, a new evening-length work about humanity’s relationship to drug use, addiction, presence, and the ineffable passage of time. The piece showcases the delicate hesitancy toward trying new things coupled with the learned fear of falling into a self-destructive pattern—all happening against a backdrop of FoMO.

Back to 2025 Artist Roster | Back to 2025 Performance Mix Festival