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By Catherine Tharin
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Published on November 2, 2025
Josie Bettman in "Swan, Pike, and Crab". Photo: Yuxi Ma
Swan, Pike, and Crab
Script and direction: Josie Bettman
Original score: sylvia celes
Performers: cove barton, Zhi Wei Hiu, and Hannah Wickramasuriya
Hair consulting: Matia Emsellem
PAGEANT, East Williamsburg, Brooklyn
October 23 - 24, 2025
Packing a three-story wooden staircase, audience members chatted happily and called up and down to one another as they waited in anticipation to enter PAGEANT, where Josie Bettman presented Swan, Pike, and Crab on October 23 and 24. Once inside this modest but welcoming East Williamsburg performance space, the crowd, mostly 30-and-under and dressed in casual attire, sat in clumps or against the wall laughing and catching up. There was a palpable sense of community energy.
Perched above a nail salon with graffitied roll-down shutters and a beauty-supply store, the venue features a gleaming wooden floor and a picture window that looks over Graham Street. The name PAGEANT suggests beauty-contest pageantry, while the space itself functions as a grassroots performance hub.
The 30-minute performance was embedded in a club culture intrinsically linked to openness in gender presentation. It reflected the mood of a community. Though the work wasn’t explicitly political, it conveyed the anxiety, ennui, and bleakness of people navigating precarious lives and spaces. Performers danced, to momentarily forget their concerns.
Bettman describes Swan, Pike, and Crab as a ‘trailer’ (Bettman's term for 'work' or 'dance') of lived experience, self-discovery, and social expression, rather than a conventional dance. The trailer moved between theatrical spectacle and social ritual. It started, paused, and started again, while the audience kept talking, only gradually realizing that the show had begun.
Flirting with glamour, the performers were visually distinct: Bettman wore a black bra, low-cut pants revealing a blue thong and big black boots. Zhi Wei Hiu appeared in a black hoodie with “Juicy” written in sparkles, a thong visible beneath opaque tights, a tiny black bra, and black boots. cove barton was bare-chested in cargo pants, with two hair-extensions flowing like tendrils from short hair. Near the entrance, Bettman and the performers, including the long-legged and long-haired Hannah Wickramasuriya, and sylvia celes, wearing wire-rimmed eyeglasses, set up a small makeup area with folding chairs where they applied a dab of lipstick and an extension of hair.
Bettman lip-synched to Lara Fabian’s Je suis malade (I am sick) in a deliberately noncommittal way. Her occasional barely decipherable murmurs provided fragments of meaning: “…not like the worst experience… appeal for attention…” The evening, set to live dialogue and recorded sound, unfolded in a sequence of scenes, or situations, whose outlines may have been set but whose content felt largely improvised.
In a duet between Wickramasuriya and Zhi, Wickramasuriya slouched in a rolling office chair (the only set piece), while Zhi arched her back, and rudely stuck out her bottom at Wickramasuriya which is the equivalent of a cheeky middle finger. Wickramasuriya mimed poses of annoyance, before kicking out. A heavy techno beat swelled, and all the performers rose to bounce to the rhythm, their long hair flying, until they collapsed one by one.
A red lamp glowed in one corner, casting its light over Zhi. While the others performed gym exercises such as side planks and rolling up and down the spine, Bettman’s muffled voice drifted through the faint plucking of piano strings: “But I appreciate you for that.” Four performers fell, rose again, paired off, and switched partners midstream. “They have something going on,” Bettman said. Three performers took to separate corners, as if retreating to private zones: “It got to the point that she took everything seriously," said celes. "C’mon girl, get it together. This is science-backed evidence. She’s walled like this, ready to jump," as Bettman leaned on the window looking out. The sardonic words hung in the air before the next scene began.
Zhi moved to a corner, as audience members scrambled out of her way. A reverberating techno sound filled the space. Zhi knelt as her hands crawled up the wall, illuminated by barton, who followed with a slide projector casting a blue light. After the solo ended, a tilted blue rectangle was projected across the room within which the action continued. The performers slowed and lay close to one another, suggesting the intimacy of spooning without actual contact. During the club dances, Bettman and celes joined the performers, moving with the group. The structure of the trailer was shaped by these intermittent dances.
A high-pitched voice was heard. Silence followed. No one moved. Then a phone rang. No one answered. The trailer was over. The work’s late start, loose pacing, and circular structure, beginning almost by accident and ending without clear closure, suggested the way time can drift and expand when you’re young, when the night feels endless and when moments bleed one into the other. What lingers is the quiet bravery of choosing to committing to come together - performers and audience alike - to dance and be seen in a wider world that could choose to look away. Living, expressing, and connecting openly becomes an act of resistance.
The title, Swan, Pike, and Crab, recalls a Russian fable in which three animals pull in different directions, a fitting metaphor for the trailor’s push and pull between separation and connection. Though five performers appear, only three, mirroring the fable's trio, are credited as performers. Bettman and celes mainly stayed on the edge of the work reciting text, and in celes' case, composing sound.
Blending everyday life and performance, the trailer suspends traditional narrative and emphasizes pliability, exploring the freedom of an unfinished work and the porous boundary between social life and art. Scenes suggest chapters in the performers’ experiences. The five founders of PAGEANT created the space to meet, to see and be seen, and to connect and watch. Bettman’s unsettled work captures the restlessness of a community still searching for and testing what is possible.
