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What People Are Saying.
“Certainly, this is the right place for Becket, who found that her life in New York didn't allow her the freedom to pursue her dreams as a dancer and artist, and that a vacant auditorium in Death Valley provided her with a blank canvas to create her own brand of dance theater.” — Daily Variety “There is indisputably a whiff of eccentricity about Ms. Becket's enterprise. And if one might expect the woman herself - dark haired, trim, with the visible sinews of a dancer — to carry an eccentric air, she doesn't, though there is a faint haughtiness of the artiste about her. Ms. Becket is self-aware, perfectly willing to admit that her shows and her painting have been her obsessions. In explanation of what amounts to her self-imposed exile, she said, 'I couldn't have created another world anyplace else'.” — New York Times “If this were fiction — if Marta Becket were not a real person — then the whole oddball-in-the-desert scenario might seem like something dreamed up by David Lynch. Or Sam Shepard. But Becket is very much the real thing, and she has made quite a name for herself out there in the desert.” — Northern California Bohemian “The forthright artist went on with what essentially was her own private show. She choreographed and performed her own dances, at first to an audience of tumbleweeds. But over the course of years, she painstakingly developed another audience — the Renaissance-looking crowd she painted in elaborate murals to fill her Amargosa Opera House with gawking spectators. Eventually Becket was discovered by living audiences, mostly appreciators of art, who have gone to great lengths to see her work. Becket overcame much and worked hard to get where she is today, a relatively unknown artist in the middle of nowhere. But she loves her unique place in the world.” — San Francisco Chronicle “There's something really wonderful about the fact that she picked the most desolate spot in America to do this. It says you can have your life on your own terms, but you'll have to sacrifice. It says the process is the point. And people come away from there inspired.” — Todd Robinson, Director, Amargosa “Becket's saga epitomizes the eternal struggle of the artist for personal expression.” — Chicago Tribune “Long ago, Becket decided to dance and let nothing stop her. Not her father's disregard. Not age or infirmity. Not the oppressive heat of summer, which can rise to 110 degrees in Death Valley. And not the lack of an audience. In Death Valley Junction, Becket danced for years in a theater that was empty save for the 'audience' she painted on the walls, a folk-art inspired mural including period-costumed Spanish lords, ladies, young lovers, and whores.” — Hartford Courant “Becket's paintings are marvelous and will live long after she is gone. The paintings are worth the long drive.” — The Connected Traveler “It takes an odd sort to inhabit a valley named for death. A flat tire stopped Marta Becket in Death Valley Junction, and she was so inspired by an abandoned theater and its surroundings that she bought it and brought it to life as the Amargosa Opera House.” — National Geographic Traveler “Occasional mesquite trees and patches of recalcitrant desert grass signal the only shade in a landscape of bleached earth and twisted rock that stretches for hours in every direction. And there, rising mirage-like from the sands at a lonely crossroads that serves as the gateway to Death Valley, the hottest, lowest, hardest place on the continent stands an opera house. For the past 30 years Marta has provided her homespun programmes of dance, mime and musical revue for a ragtag collection of patrons, many of whom have inspired the characters that people her shows; Mormons, truckers, cowboys, farmhands, hippies, dreamers, tourists, and gamblers burned on the roulette tables across the Nevada border nearby, even the femmes de nuit from local bordellos.” — The UK Guardian “ Marta's paintings have a degree of humor and playfulness. The use of color is outstanding and tells of a generosity, talent and skill.” — Red Skelton, Comedian/Artist |
Book Review
By M. A. Duval  What is it with America and eccentrics? Unlike Britain, which has an almost familial relationship with its assorted
flat-earthers, odd uncles, and hermits next door, America alternately shuns and embraces the free thinkers within its
borders. Follow your creative muses to the middle of nowhere, and people would just as soon not hear about it. Follow your
creative muses to the middle of nowhere but do it in a way that's admirable, quixotic, and genuinely artistic, and people
will not only seek you out, they'll beat the drum for you and make sure that other people seek you out as well.
Case in point: dancer, artist, and general all-around creative muse follower Marta Becket, whose autobiography To Dance on Sands has just been published by Las Vegas-based publisher Stephens Press. Becket is probably best known as the subject of the Todd Robinson film Amargosa, nominated for an Academy Award in the Best Documentary category in 2000. For the past almost 40 years, Becket has operated the Amargosa Opera House in her own personal middle of nowhere, Death Valley Junction, California. There, the ballet-trained Becket writes, scores, choreographs, and performs what she calls “dance mimes,” sometimes funny, sometimes poignant performance pieces with names like Comeback Vaudeville and Turkish Fairytale. The dance mimes make full use of Becket's considerable talents as a dancer, pantominist, and artist, (Did I mention that she also paints the sets? And that, except for an emcee, she's the only performer?) and Becket's work in Death Valley Junction has resulted in magazine articles and news features in media outlets around the world. As To Dance on Sands makes clear though, the Amargosa Opera House is only the most recent phase of a career that spans Broadway, television, and the highs and lows of a life in the theater-from featured roles as a ballerina to cheap, fly-by-night bookings in the dying days of variety. Becket was born Martha Beckett in Lower Manhattan in 1924. “Each afternoon Mother would take me down the street to Washington Square in an old wicker baby carriage. The butcher would give me a discarded chicken foot to play with on the way home.” The only child of a soon-divorced couple, Becket spent her early life moving from place to place with her stock market-obsessed mother to avoid contact with the person known as “Mana,” Becket's distant, disapproving father, who had ended the marriage to live with his wife's best friend. Despite this whiff of Greenwich Village bohemia, it's the relationship between Becket and her mother that underlies much of To Dance on Sands and that gives the book its emotional heft. Becket's mother is both a goad to her artistic ambitions and a constant, needy presence in her life. “Mother was melancholy most of the time. She would play sad songs on the piano and sing softly to herself. I began to associate Mother with sadness.” Becket lives with her mother well into her 30s. Young Marta is a shy, too-tall girl who takes every chance she can to lose herself in art, music, and theater. But it's when she finally convinces her mother to pay for dance lessons that she really feels she's found her calling: “I sighed the largest and most meaningful sigh of my life. I felt a glowing inside, an anticipation of being completely alive at last. Now I will be able to express with my body what up until now was expressed with brush and piano. The door to this world that had been shut to me for so long was now open...I was going to dance through space and become a part of the music instead of a listener.” To Dance on Sands follows Becket through her various lives as a model, well-regarded painter, and dancer on television, stage, and in Broadway classics like Wonderful Town. Although Becket is strangely reticent sometimes when it comes to her love life (there's a general feeling of hurt and discomfort as she describes her first marriage), her quirky, engaging prose style captures the flavor of a woman who never stops doing her own thing despite financial and emotional hardship. But what about the famous Amargosa Opera House? The last fourth of To Dance on Sands is devoted to Becket's life in Death Valley and to what she and many others have come to see as an almost inevitable meeting of artist and venue. Becket stumbles across the ruined hall when she and her husband stop to fix a flat tire. Despite floods, suspicious locals, and a cheating spouse, Becket works to renovate the former mining company theater so that she can perform her own dances — sometimes only to the audience she's painted on the theater walls. To Dance on Sands is the story of a genuine American eccentric who happens also to be that rare thing: an artist engaged completely in her work, an artist who performs not for money or adulation, but simply because she's a dancer who found her perfect stage...and then never stopped dancing. To Dance on Sands is available from local bookstores, at online retailers, and directly from www.stephenspress.com. |
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