Marta Becket (1924–2017)

If, say, you were driving through Baker, California on Highway 15 and decided to take yourself north on State Route 127 (maybe because you'd heard it was the "Lost Highway" of Lynchian fame), you would eventually find yourself in the tiny, ghost-like settlement of Death Valley Junction. Where it would not be too much of a stretch to think you'd discovered the original Hotel California: amid the ruins of a borax mining company town stands the Amargosa Opera House and Hotel, white-washed, low-slung and the dominion, for more than 40 years, of dancer and artist Marta Becket.

The building's inscrutable exterior doesn't hint at the most striking feature inside - the murals painted by Ms. Becket on the walls of the opera house, the hotel lobby and several of the guest rooms. The audience of royals, priests, prostitutes and other worthies were created on the blank opera house walls to watch her perform when no one else would brave desert roads and temperature extremes to see her productions – written, choreographed and performed by Marta herself. (The painted audience may have seemed a bit redundant later when media attention, including a photo in National Geographic, brought packed houses to nearly every performance). Other murals depict cherubs, desert scenes, European streets. Together they offer a glimpse into a rich imagination and the remarkable will that brought it to life.

To Dance on Sands chronicles the life that led her to settle in Death Valley Junction in the late 1960s, following a brief stop many years earlier that introduced her to the desert and a fortuitous flat tire that stranded her years later at a gas station across the street from what became the Opera House.

Ms. Becket's troubled early life in Philadelphia and New York City included divorced parents, a disapproving and largely absent father, several moves and a dramatically overbearing mother, and led her to painting and theater as a refuge. A strange desire to remain physically childlike both to avoid the awkwardness of puberty and make her mother happy led her to begin ballet at nearly 14. The realization that she had started too late and was too tall to become a prima ballerina did not detract from her determination to dance, and she managed to support both her mother and her own artistic vision by dancing in touring companies and selling her paintings. This provided enough money to stage her own productions, one at Carnegie Hall. Her focus on her art was single-minded, always. She recognizes that “I’m not like other dancers. I don’t need the parties, the boyfriends, nor the social life. I like people out in front, on the other side of the footlights. When the show is over, they go home, leaving me alone with my best friend, myself. I may be a dancer, but I have the temperament of a painter who must work alone for hours. Solitude is my fuel.”

Only about 50 pages are devoted to her life at Death Valley Junction, where she remade the unused theater and then the hotel, gave ballet lessons to local children, and above all painted and danced. She was not there to make friends, noting that the townsfolk considered her husband and her “odd.” Her husband eventually tired of the desert life and his wife’s single-minded focus and moved on, replaced by a companion who might also have been considered odd by the townsfolk, but who supported her work and even performed with her. “The important thing now was to do my thing,” Marta writes. “Whether anything would come of it was not important.” Something did in fact come of it; thousands saw Marta perform before her final performance in 2012, a documentary film was made about her, her paintings are collected. She’s an inspiration to those who admire the ones who follow their own vision, wherever it leads.… (more)