Creating an Unexpected Audience in an Unlikely Place

How Marta Becket danced to dust devils in the desert

On my recent trip to Death Valley for my 60th birthday I had an unexpected experience that I found both overwhelmingly inspiring and haunting at the same time.

I stayed one night in Death Valley Junction, a little ghost town also known as Amargosa (Spanish for “bitter”) that dates back to 1907 when the Tonopah and Tidewater Railroad was constructed through the Amargosa Valley and a spur from their main line was built to the borax mine in the hills to the west.

The land is so inhospitable that the miners at the borax mine initially had a life expectancy of only six months after starting the job. They slept in tents next to the railroad tracks until a “company town” was built in the 1920s, which later developed into the Amargosa Opera House and Hotel.

The town was essentially abandoned by mid-century, though, until … it found a strange and unlikely destiny—as a theater town, you might say.

The voice: “I offer you life.”

The town’s destiny was reshaped by Marta Becket, a dancer who had been in the corps de ballet at Radio City Music Hall and appeared as a background dancer in Broadway shows.

She decided that she didn’t want to dance in the background, though—she wanted to be the star.

“I danced for people who told me what to do, not what I wanted to do,” she said.

So she took her one-woman show across the country, performing in small theaters and school auditoriums. She was traveling through Death Valley in 1967 with her husband as part of her one-woman show when they had a flat tire, and they ended up in Amargosa to repair it.

While exploring the town’s abandoned buildings, Marta was hypnotically drawn to the town’s old social hall, and she peeked through a hole and found a room in terrible disrepair. Wooden floors were caked with muddy remains from floodwaters, walls were streaked with rust-colored stains from the leaking roof, and Kangaroo rats ran wild.

But she had a vision. She heard the building speaking to her, saying, “Take me. Do something with me. I offer you life!”

Perhaps that vision had begun when her father took her to the theater in New York when she was a little girl. “What went on on the other side of the curtain was what I wanted for my mind,” she said.

She tracked down the property manager and inquired about renting the space, and he rented it to her for $45 per month as long as she was responsible for all repairs.

Dancing for an audience of royalty

She began fixing it all up—turning Folger’s coffee cans into stage lights, sewing curtains and costumes, and painting sets.

And she started performing three times a week. The problem? Most of those performances were to an empty theater because no one lived there.

Marta was also a painter, so she began what would be a six-year project of painting murals on the walls and ceiling of the theater—painting an audience of Renaissance royalty, nuns and monks, clowns and jousters, revelers and cherubs—and Clive Barnes, the longtime drama critic of The New York Times, as a nod to her theatrical past.

“People would tell me that I was wasting my time painting on the walls of a building that I would never own or that I couldn’t sell and it could be torn down any time,” she said. “I would say to them that no one can take away the hours of joy that I had painting it.”

Her audience showed up in full regalia to watch every dance performance.

She was never a background dancer again. She was the show. In the early 1970s, both National Geographic and Life magazines featured her, and real people started to fill the seats, including the likes of Ray Bradbury and Red Skelton.

She called the theater her “life blood.” Of her performances, she said. “I was in my own world. It was mystical.”

“Am I eccentric?” she asked in an interview with The New York Times in 1999. “Is it eccentric to love your work so much that you would go anywhere in the world to do it?”

She danced until her last performance in February of 2012, when she was 87. She stopped performing because she could no longer dance “on pointe,” and she didn’t think ballet should be danced if not on pointe.

I love this story because Marta imparts heroic creative lessons:

• Trust your visions—and pay close attention to what the world is telling you

• Create your audience—real or imagined

• Make your “eccentricity” your normal state

• Find joy in the making of art, not the final product

• You are what you do repeatedly, so Marta was a star dancer.

Dancing to dust devils

Part of the reason I went to Death Valley for my 60th was to reflect on death now that I’ve started my third and final act (unless this life is the cosmic joke I hope it is and someone appears at the end to tell me it’s all just been a game).

I loved Marta’s view of death, which she saw embodied in dust devils. A dust devil picks dust up and spins it into a spiral and then disappears. She wanted to become a dust devil when she died and “keep the spell living.”

She obviously kept the spell living. I’ve now breathed it into me.¹

Read my previous piece: This is 60: Creativity in the Third Act.

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A beautiful short film about Marta Becket

Because a quote

"While you have time left, find a place where you can live out your dreams. Even if it is on top of a mountain or in the middle of a desert."

—Marta Becket

What better creative advice is there?

Please buy my book

Because a photo

This shabby little graveyard is just on the edge of Amargosa. It is the perfect cemetery, I think.

1. I wouldn’t have been captured by this spell without the recommendation from my good friend Beth Howard, known as “the Pie Lady” of Iowa. Check out all of her wonderful projects.