“I walked over to the building, afraid to take my eyes off it, lest it should disappear.”ģ takeaways from Arizona State's offensive explosion, win over Colorado Reality stars Heavy D and Diesel Dave help remove plane wreck from Jefferson Wilderness First criminal charges filed in Ojai's Thacher school's sexual abuse investigation Utah pilot program looks to save water, offers residents cash to remove grassĭeath Valley Junction is also known for its dark skies. “By now, I had forgotten the tire,” she wrote in her autobiography, "To Dance on Sands: The Life and Art of Death Valley’s Marta Becket," published in 2006. Turns out, while Thomas saw to the repair, Marta wandered - and don’t we love wandering - saw a bunch of buildings, which included a hotel built in the 1920s by the Pacific Coast Borax mining company and a large structure that miners had used as a gathering place called Corkhill Hall. Five years later, on the way to a ballet gig, the travel trailer they were towing blew a tire out in Death Valley, and the only place where it could be repaired was in Death Valley Junction. In 1962, she met the man who would become her husband, Thomas Williams. Marta started touring the United States with her one-woman show, performing all the great ballets in small theatres across this great country. Today, should you be in Amargosa, you can catch a show, these days performed by artists who, inspired by Marta’s journey, come to put on limited runs of shows there.“I wanted the freedom to express myself,” Marta explained in "Dust Devil." The audiences even have complex stories such as the “group of royal children tended by a governess who is being courted by a gentleman seated in the balcony above.” It took Marta four years to complete the murals… then she started on the ceilings.Įventually Marta was able to buy the Opera House (she had been renting it for some 20 years), and it acquired more seats and a grand piano. King, queen, royalty, nobility, bullfighters, monks, nuns, American Indians, ladies of the night to gypsies - all attend the show. In July of 1968, Marta began a massive project of painting a 16th-century royal audience on the walls, each with a different face. The audiences were modest, the first one consisting of twelve adults and children, but Marta had a plan.
Marta promptly settled down there and, having been a dancer and performer her whole life, began performing shows in the Opera House. The building seemed to be saying, ‘Take me… do something with me… I offer you life.’” “Peering through the tiny hole, I had the distinct feeling that I was looking at the other half of myself. It was obviously abandoned… and had been for some time.” She found herself “peering into the the old theater that would become the Amargosa Opera House. She soon found the old building and, drawn to it, noticed a hole in a door, where she could see inside. While her husband attended to the tire, Marta wandered through the town. By 1925, the mining operation moved, and the town was left to be turned back into sand by the desert.īut this was not to be, for in the spring of 1967, Marta Becket and her husband found themselves stuck with a flat tire near the town of Amargosa. Originally part of the Pacific Coast Borax company town, the Amargosa served as the miners’ recreation hall, where church services, movies, dances, funerals, and town meetings all took place starting in 1923. But beyond these maintained areas, Death Valley Junction is in a state of disrepair. The hotel is operating, and the shows continue at the opera house: Resident Marta Becket staged dance and mime shows there since the late 1960s up until her death in February, 2017. Suffice to say, these are odd municipal statistics. The Amargosa, whose name stems from the Spanish word for “bitter” (amargo), is located in a town called Death Valley Junction - population: less than 20, restaurants: 0, gas stations: 0, opera house: 1. In the middle of Death Valley – one of the harshest and most extreme environments on earth – stands one of the most unusual hotels in America, the Amargosa Opera House and Hotel.
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