Amargosa Opera House and Hotel, 608 Death Vly Jct, Death Valley, CA, 92328, USA
May 27, 2021
I’ve been wanting to write about an intriguing story about a dancer that I came across while doing my Mars analog fieldwork. No better way to re-start the field stories after a writing hiatus than with a story about Marta Becket.
During field planning, I divided my field work into two parts. The first part consisted of collecting samples in Death Valley and the second part consisted of a mine visit in Boron, south of Death Valley. While we were collecting samples in Death Valley, we set base camp at the Furnace Creek campsite. Every morning we made sure we started super early to beat the mid-morning heat and came back to our tents exhausted and a little dehydrated. On the last day of sample collection in Death Valley, we had only 2 sample sites to visit. So, on our way back, we had time to stop at interesting spots without having to worry about saving energy for hammering rocks and lugging them back.
We had been driving past the Amargosa Opera House every day as we left the campsite for fieldwork, and this day we decided to stop and look around. The Amargosa Opera House and Hotel looked like a structure from another time. The building was covered in white peeling paint and the cracks and paint peels looked more like a design than sun damage. As we walked along the corridor of the building, it felt like ghosts from the past were watching us suspiciously from behind the white lace curtains in the windows. I wondered what the structure looked like in its prime with the Opera House at full capacity. Although this is a strange connection, it also made me think about how trying to imagine Amargosa’s past based on these ghost-towny remnants of a decade of human activity is a little bit like trying figure out the history of Mars based on what is left on Mars today. The place made me think of ancient Mars which was more exciting than a dry inhospitable planet…a warmer, wetter period where exciting things happened, rain filled up lakes and the atmospheric conditions were right to have liquid water on the Martian surface! But now it is like the ghost town I was in with only remnants of a time when life was possible.
On the other side of the road from the Amargosa Opera house was an enclosed concrete room with large windows you could see the entire room through. In front of each window, inside the concrete room was a mannequin of a torso…the kind they use for sewing which has no head or arms. Each mannequin displayed a unique dress with beautiful colors and fabrics. The dresses looked like costumes for dance performances, and they looked a little out of place against the bare ground of the concrete room and the south-Californian desert. The nearly empty room with headless mannequins with beautiful dresses looked eerie and fascinating. I had so many questions. Thankfully, there were boards next to the mannequins that explained that the dresses belonged to a dancer named Marta Becket.
Marta Becket was a dancer from New York who took a trip to Death Valley and had a flat tire near the Death Valley junction in the 1960s. That is when she discovered the abandoned Corkill Hall. When she peeked through a hole in the door of the hall, Marta felt like the building called out to her asking her to do something with the space. She was inspired to bring the place back to life. She renamed the hall to Amargosa Opera House, painted it, and devoted the rest of her life to performing there. Sometimes she didn’t have a lot of audience, so she painted her own audience on the walls of the hall. She often struggled with the limited resources she had but she worked incredibly hard and inspired many who saw her preform. She brought life and color to Death Valley just like the desert wildflowers did.
When I read that story, at first it felt like a strange thing for a person to do. I feared for her failure although she was no longer alive when I read about her, and I had nothing to do with her life whatsoever. After the initial uncomfortable thoughts, I felt a sort of comfort and inspiration. People have often been fearful about failure for me and have told me not to do things because they are unusual, and that they don’t see me succeeding in my endeavors.
Marta was passionate and she just went ahead and did her thing. It made me think that maybe it’s not about succeeding in all your endeavors. Maybe its about just doing your thing that inspires you to the best of your ability without the constant fear of failure. I felt good having found that story during fieldwork.