Marta Becket photographed on the Amargosa Opera House stage for LIFE Magazine. | Photo: Vernon Merritt for Life Magazine. Time Inc. The Mojave Project is an experimental transmedia documentary by Kim Stringfellow exploring the physical, geological and cultural landscape of the Mojave Desert. The Mojave Project reconsiders and establishes multiple ways in which to interpret this unique and complex landscape, through association and connection of seemingly unrelated sites, themes, and subjects thus creating a speculative and immersive experience for its audience.
A fortuitous flat tire came after a fortune tellers prophecy that suggested the letter A loomed large on Marta Beckets personal horizon. This led the multi-talented doyenne to resurrect and transform Death Valley Junctions decaying community meeting hall into a gloriously muraled theater where for four decades she has performed her own choreographed ballet and vaudeville acts for an international audience.
Her legendary story is not only the subject of the Emmy-winning documentary Amargosa (2000), but one that fans from across the globe have sought out here in the desert for years now. Many have traveled to this remote corner at the eastern edge of Death Valley National Park to catch a fleeting glimpse of Beckets desert legacy in art, music and dance -- now continued through the efforts of a young but retired Bay-area ballerina who was originally inspired to take up dance when she first witnessed Becket on stage at six years of age.
Born on August 9, 1924 in New York Citys Greenwich Village, creatively precocious Martha Beckett began studying ballet at age 14 -- considered a late start in the professional dance world -- through encouragement and support from her somewhat overbearing mother. Naturally talented, she began dancing professionally during her early 20s with the corps de ballet at Radio City Music Hall and later on Broadway in three popular musicals including Showboat. Well before the dance lessons of her teenage years, the young Martha Beckett (she later changed her name to Marta Becket) was instructed in a variety of other classic visual and performing arts including painting, drawing and piano. She excelled at them all. Her life infused with art, dance and music has continued for nearly 90 years now.
The Kite Flyer, one of Marta Beckets earlier paintings recently sold on auction. | Image: Courtesy of Myers Art Gallery.
While touring the regional circuit in the early 1960s performing with her own repertoire, Becket also managed to secure an art gallery in NYC where she began to sell her figurative paintings of whimsical New York City street scenes -- city parks, costume shops, circuses populated with a variety of theatrical and stylized children, shop keepers, carnies and even bored fortune tellers. A critic of the day commented in Art News rather presciently: In the midst of crowds and glitter, her figures seem isolated and withdrawn -- living in private existences in closed worlds while displaying their bodies publicly. Convinced that she would receive her big break when her one-woman show opened at NYCs Waverly Gallery on November 23, 1963, her hopes were dashed when the sad news of President Kennedys assassination spread around the world the very same day. Still, Becket continued to paint and sell her canvasses between performance tours.
After marrying her manager Tom Williams in 1962, the two embarked on a series of one-person show tours of the Western United States. During these years, Becket began to see, experience and grow to appreciate the Western landscape, which differed vastly from what she had known growing up in New York City.
Marta Becket and her husband Tom Williams photographed at Death Valley Junction for LIFE Magazine. | Photo: Vernon Merritt for Life Magazine. Time Inc.
During one tour, the couple decided to camp between shows for a week at the Furnace Creek campground in Death Valley National Monument. The year was 1967 and the interest for performance programs of her ilk was dwindling fast due to the profound upheaval in 1960s popular culture. Colleges, universities and community halls where she performed regularly over the previous years were now more interested in booking burgeoning rock n roll acts, spoken word and other hip happenings of the time.
But Becket and her husband were also exhausted from the traveling touring required and the flat tire on their travel trailer did not help the situation. Out of necessity, they motored 30 miles east to a tiny roadside enclave called Death Valley Junction that featured a run-down Mexican Colonial adobe building housing the former company offices, laborers quarters and a 23-room hotel with a full dining room of the Pacific Coast Borax Company. Of course, a filling station enabled them to attend to the damaged tire.
Designed by architect Alexander Hamilton McCulloch and built during 1923-25, the now shuttered building was likely originally constructed in response to author Zane Grays published observation in Tales of Lonely Trails (1922) of the horrible living conditions provided (or not provided) by Pacific Coast Borax Company at the time:
It was sunset when we arrived at Death Valley Junction -- a weird, strange sunset in drooping curtains of transparent cloud, lighting up dark mountain ranges, some peaks of which were clear-cut and black against the sky, and others veiled in trailing storms, and still others white with snow... Next morning, while Nielsen packed the outfit, I visited the borax mill. It was the property of an English firm, and the work of hauling, grinding, roasting borax ore went on day and night. Inside it was as dusty and full of a powdery atmosphere as an old-fashioned flour mill. The ore was hauled by train from some twenty miles over toward the valley, and was dumped from a high trestle into shutes that fed the gri
