Marta Becket - To Dance On Sands

About Marta Becket

Tears came to my eyes. Marta represented to me the spirit of the individual. The spirit of the theater. The spirit of creativity.

Ray Bradbury, Author

Martas paintings have a degree of humor and playfulness. The use of color is outstanding and tell of a generosity, talent and skill.

Red Skelton, Comedian/Artist

Long before anybody invented the term performance art, Marta Becket was doing it, in an abandoned opera house in Death Valley Junction. She restored it and it restored her. With serene tenacity, she set down roots, working hard for decades, caring as well for endangered animals, including wild burros, until the world began coming to her.

Boston Globe

Beckets saga epitomizes the eternal struggle of the artist for personal expression.

Chicago Tribune

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

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

On stage there is a warble to her voice. She is thin, but her expressions are as varied and fluid as shifting sand dunes. To say that Becket was beautiful when she was young, as evidenced by photographs in her program is to do a disservice to the beauty she still holds.

Los Angeles Times

Theres 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 youll have to sacrifice. It says the process is the point. And people come away from there inspired.

Todd Robinson, Director, Amargosa

There is indisputably a whiff of eccentricity about Ms. Beckets 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 doesnt, 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 couldnt have created another world anyplace else.

New York Times

Death Valley holds a special mystique for Europeans. You can find them among the locals in the 120-seat house, along with the occasional journalist or ghost-hunter the place has a reputation for being haunted.

Dance Magazine

Beckets 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

Copyright 2015 Marta Becket

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING, INC.

New York, NY

First originally published by Page Publishing, Inc. 2015

ISBN 978-1-63417-661-3 (pbk)

ISBN 978-1-63417-662-0 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Dedica t ion

I am grateful to my mother, Helen Beckett, for the happy creative childhood I had. The Christmas she gave me in Rose Valley was the most beautiful Christmas of my life. I thank my father, Henry Beckett, for exposing me as a four-year-old to the operetta ballet performances and stage presentations which helped me know that theater was the life I wanted and had to have. I am even grateful to Sioma Glaser who challenged me to create a dance company based on Oriental scenarios. Although he never came up with the money to back the venture, it woke me up to what I could do and the marvelous possibilities that created my Turkish fairytale, The Mirror, The Carpet, and The Lemon. From that challenge came Nat Jerome, a theatrical agent who, when watching me audition all the parts in The Mirror, The Carpet, and The Lemon , encouraged me to work on a one woman show of my own, playing all the parts instead of relying on a company of dancers. Thus was launched my program of dance pantomimes. I thank George Michaelson and Harold Alford for booking me on my first two tours for the University of Minnesota. Yes, and I thank Tom Williams for bringing me to Death Valley Junction where I began my second life. Most importantly I thank Tom Willet, affectionately known as Wilget, for sharing my creative and personal life for the last 23 years, from installing all the theater seats in the Amargosa Opera House to playing many parts in the twelve stage productions we staged together. Last but not least, I thank McDonald Harris for encouraging me to write my autobiography, for without that encouragement, this book might not have been written.

Proteus : Say that upon the altar of her beauty You sacrifice your tears, your sighs, your heart:Write till your ink be dry, and with your tears Moist it again, and frame some feeling line That may discover such integrity:

For Orpheus lute was strung with poets sinews,Whose golden touch could soften steel and stones,Make tigers tame and huge leviathans Forsake unsounded deeps to dance on sands.

After your dire-lamenting elegies,Visit by night your ladys chamber-window

With some sweet concert; to their instruments Tune a deploring dump: the nights dead silence Will well become such sweet-complaining grievance.

This, or else nothing, will inherit her.

Two Gentlemen of Verona Act Three, Scene Two Dukes Palace

Over t ure

A ll my friends and acquaintances from New York thought I had lost my mind when I told them about this old theater that had been abandoned for twenty years. When I told them I was planning to leave New York for good and make a new life for myself out in the desert, they were convinced that I was now a hopeless case and gave me up for good.

Fifteen years passed before I heard from any of them. Perhaps they saw my picture and an article about me in a National Geographic they saw in some dentists office. The article told a story about this dancer from New York who performs every night in an abandoned theater in the desert whether anyone shows up or not. In fact, they even said I painted a Renaissance audience on all three walls of my theater so that I would be guaranteed an audience each performance night. This of course is untrue. I painted a Renaissance audience to surround my performance with an atmosphere complementary to what I performed.