At 7:00 a.m. on a foggy summer morning, it’s 50 degrees on California’s Central Coast. On a Zoom screen, Miami resident Hannah Baumgarten appears in a tank top. Heavy draperies at her right attempt to block the Florida sun, and the blades of a ceiling fan circle high overhead. But Baumgarten, a ballerina, modern dancer, choreographer, entrepreneur, and all-around supporter of the arts, is no stranger to the Central Coast, or to Dickens and Great Expectations. The daughter of Dickens Project founding director Murray Baumgarten, she grew up in Santa Cruz and attended Santa Cruz High School, where she read Great Expectations for the first time in a ninth-grade English class taught by Julie Minnis. Minnis is also on-screen this morning, and she and Baumgarten have kept in touch over the years, partly because their families are Santa Cruz neighbors.
“I remember seeing Hannah walk to school with her friend Letitia,” said Minnis. “It was one ballet pirouette after another.” Indeed, dance was Baumgarten’s first and considerable love; she started lessons at age 5. Her parents wanted her to have a more academically oriented career, but after graduating from high school, she tried the University of Utah and ended up in the Salt Lake City ballet company for two years. It was there that she realized she was too tall for ballet, so she switched to modern dance and danced professionally in New York City, eventually graduating from Julliard in just three years.
The experience with Great Expectations in Minnis’s class didn’t end with reading the book. Minnis devised Victorian activities such as teas and dances both in the classroom and at her home to give the students a feel for the time period. And Baumgarten’s father Murray, himself in the process of launching the Dickens Universe with co-founder John Jordan, invited the high school class to audit his Victorian literature course at the relatively new UC Santa Cruz.
Baumgarten’s current work is as a choreographer with her own company, DanceNow! Miami, which she and her partner Diego Salterini founded in 2000. Its recent production of Baumgarten’s ballet Havisham! will be presented in video format at this year’s Universe. The character of Miss Havisham “had been in my head a long time,” she said, and “It was traumatic to create this ballet,” Baumgarten said. “I was angry, hysterical, trying to understand the vengeance.” But, she continued, “Good art requires that we continue to revisit it.” Baumgarten’s revisitation of Miss Havisham melds a number of artistic, and logistic, aspects. The ballet premiered in North Miami Beach on February 7 of this year in the Ancient Spanish Monastery, the oldest building in the Western hemisphere. Yes, that’s the building’s name, and yes, it is a real 12th-century Spanish monastery, originally brought piece-by-piece to the U.S. by William Randolph Hearst, stored in New York (where it fell apart) for years, and then re-built in Miami.
The location makes this one of Baumgarten’s “site-specific” interactive productions, and the building becomes a part of the story. The largest space in the monastery, Baumgarten said, was used for the room with the moldering wedding cake, and the smallest is used for the love duet. Costumes are Victorian, but with a touch of Spanish flair, given the location. “Dickens is not ‘in the canon’ in South Florida,” Baumgarten said. The costumes follow suit, and the narrator (who appears in every scene, each one of which takes place in a different room) tells the story in Spanglish. It’s an immersive experience for the original audience, and it includes chamber music by the South Beach Chamber Ensemble. The four performances in February were sold out.
How does Baumgarten see her title character? “Horrible. Bitter. Harsh,” Baumgarten said. “But how did this person get to this place, where they would purposely destroy their own child for their pleasure?” There turns out to be an applicable psychological term, Baumgarten said: “cross generational transmission of trauma.” Miss Havisham was destroyed when she was left at the altar, and “what was left was the bad, or became the bad,” she went on. She sees her work as not necessarily feminist, but from a female perspective. “Women came up to me afterward and said, ‘This is a woman’s story.’ It’s a female experience.”
Translating the video content shot in several locations during the performance into a cohesive single film was its own challenge. Baumgarten was pleased with the result. “Collaboration is how the arts will survive,” she said, and her collaboration of the monastery museum, her company, the musicians, and the videographers is a wonderful example.
Havisham! will be screened Thursday afternoon of Universe week at 4:00 in the Humanities Lecture Hall. More about Baumgarten and her company can be found at dancenowmiami.org
