According to Fossemalle, Becket is an inspiration to anyone who wants to follow a dream. She discovered Becket by chance when visiting Death Valley 20 years ago and has returned two to three times every year since then, often with her students. Originally from France, she lives in the valley, where for more than two decades she has taught ballet at the Fossemalle Dance Studio. The proceeds will go toward the creation of a museum in Death Valley Junction that will house Becket’s costumes, dummies, and stage sets.Ĭhristine Fossemalle is the director of SYVPAC. This Saturday, June 28, the Santa Ynez Valley Performing Arts Company (SYVPAC) hosts a screening of the film in Buellton. “People asked why I did it, and I said, ‘Well, I have to be ready for when they do show up.'”īecket is the subject of a 2000 Emmy Award-winning documentary, Amargosa, directed by Todd Robinson. “In the old days, after being here three or four years, I often gave a performance and nobody showed up,” Becket told me on the phone from Death Valley Junction recently. She paints her own sets and backdrops, sews her own costumes, choreographs her own movements, and writes her own scripts. Becket’s shows incorporate dancing, singing, acting, and original music. Marta Becketįorty-one years later, 83-year-old Becket is the sole resident of Death Valley Junction and the director of the AmarÂ-gosa Opera House, where, since 1968, she has performed her one-woman show every week for eight months of every year. Peering through a hole in the wall, she was overcome with the desire to stay and fix it up. She followed its adobe colonnade to the far end, where she was amazed to discover an abandoned theater. Wandering around town, Marta stumbled upon the Amargosa Hotel.
In Death Valley National Park, they got a flat tire, and were directed to Death Valley Junction to have it repaired. In 1967, a young dancer from New York City drove out to California for a vacation with her husband. Driving through the tiny community of Death Valley Junction, 30 miles from the closest gas station, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was uninhabited. It’s a landscape that brings some people to life, and speaks to others of death. The eastern California desert is a beautiful, desolate place-a land of sand and tumbleweed, creosote bushes, wild burros, and gusts of wind that whip clouds of dust high into the sky.
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