To Dance on Sands

Becket autographs programs after a performance

Stage Manager and Master of Ceremonies,
the late Thomas J. Willett

Amargosa Opera House

About the Book

In her new autobiography, To Dance on Sands, dancer, painter, and proto-performance artist Marta Becket describes the feeling she had when, as a young girl in 1930s Manhattan, she finally persuaded her mother to pay for dance lessons: “I sighed the largest and most meaningful sigh of my life. I felt a glowing inside, an anticipation of being completely alive at last.”

It was this desire to immerse herself in her own world of dance that eventually led Becket to Death Valley Junction, California, and the famed Amargosa Opera House. Becket has lived there since 1967, when she and her first husband happened across the old, abandoned mining town theater after they stopped to fix a flat tire.

For the past 35+ years, Becket has staged her own “dance mimes” at the theater. She raises the curtain come rain or shine, whether there's one person in the hall or 100. In the early days, when her audience was almost nonexistent, Becket decided to paint her own on the walls of the theater, and she did — a motley blend of Renaissance royalty and everyday folk.

Becket's life and work as the writer, choreographer, set painter, and sole performer at the opera house was the subject of the Academy Award-nominated documentary Amargosa, directed by Todd Robinson. After first seeing one of Becket's dances, popular author and Becket fan Ray Bradbury said, “Tears came to my eyes. Marta represented to me the spirit of the individual. The spirit of the theater. The spirit of creativity.”

As To Dance on Sands makes clear, Death Valley is just the most recent venue for the talents of Becket, whose career as a dancer and artist spans Broadway, television, and theater in forms both high (featured appearances as a ballerina) and low ($10-a-night engagements in the squalid last days of variety).

Marta Becket was born in bohemian Greenwich Village of 1924, the only child of journalist Henry Beckett and his wife Helen. The marriage ended not long after Marta was born when her father moved in with her mother's best friend. This left Marta and her mother in circumstances that were often financially precarious: “I slept on an old couch with broken springs that dug into my ribs. The one and one-half room quarters used to be a porch. Once walls were built around the porch to make it a rentable room, it was discovered the couch was too large to move out the doorway, so there it stayed.”

To Dance on Sands, published by Las Vegas-based Stephens Press, tells the story of Becket's colorful life in her own quirkily vibrant words. The book covers her unstable childhood as a shy, artistic girl, her budding career as a New York dancer, with its grinding schedule of practices and auditions, and her eventual rebirth as the creative diva of Death Valley. There are also failed romances, family estrangements, and the triumphs and disappointments of a life in the art and theater worlds.

In the end, To Dance on Sands is a testament to Becket's great strength of will. When her muse led her to a ramshackle auditorium in the middle of the most desolate spot in America, she heeded the call and, despite great personal and financial hardship, turned it into an oasis for seekers of art and beauty from all points of the compass.

As readers of To Dance on Sands will find out, Marta Becket wouldn't have had it any other way.


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