Stranded by flat tire, ballerina brought life to desert ghost town

CARSON CITY, Nev. — A ballerina who drew audiences from around the world to an abandoned Mojave Desert stage she adopted after being stranded there by a flat tire in 1967 has died at the age of 92.

Marta Becket was stranded near the ghost town about 95 miles west of Las Vegas and said she felt destined to revive it.

With one glimpse inside an abandoned social hall there, Becket saw the other half of her life, she told The Associated Press in 2001. A native New Yorker who had performed on Broadway and at Radio City Music Hall, Becket moved West to renovate the dilapidated building that’s now an artistic sanctuary known as the Amargosa Opera House.

Louis Kavouras described Becket’s shows as vaudevillian assemblages of brief dramatic and comedic pieces, but always with a strange and contemporary twist. Kavouras, chairman of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, department of dance, said Becket’s art never failed to surprise him.

He was mystified when he saw Becket in 1992, then in her late 60s, rise to her toes and float across the stage in a difficult, shuffling ballet move known as a pas de bourrée.

“It was magic,” Kavouras said, “like the hot desert wind flowing across the desert sand.”

She continued flitting across the stage in her iconic performances well into her 80s, although health problems slowed her in later years. She gave a final performance in February 2012 before turning over the theater to a nonprofit group.

Tom Walker, a city councilman in North Cowichan, British Columbia, said he and his wife stumbled upon Becket’s act about 15 years ago during a winter RV trip. He described Becket as a kind, memorable woman, then in her 70s, who talked with him and his wife for 45 minutes after the show and performed for them again en pointe.

“She said at the time she was probably the oldest person who could still do that in her ballet slippers,” Walker said.

Becket and her husband rented the building, and Marta Becket made her debut in 1968 at the renamed Amargosa Opera House. In the beginning, her only patrons were the three Mormon families who lived in the isolated town.

The nearest town is 23 miles from the opera house, but audiences filled its 114 theater seats so many times over the years that extra chairs sometimes had to be brought in.

Becket wrote songs and dialogue, sewed costumes and painted sets. She danced every Monday, Friday and Saturday, whether the house was full or empty, as if thousands were watching.

She spent six years drawing, painted imaginary fans on the opera house’s walls and painted the ceiling with a blue sky, dancing cherubs, clouds and doves.

“I love dance. I love ballet. It’s the world I want,” she told The Associated Press 2001.

Her husband left in 1983, leaving Becket and her longtime friend, emcee, stagehand, stage manager and silent sidekick Tom Willett as the town’s only residents. Willett died in 2005.

Her story was captured in 2000 in the award-winning documentary “Amargosa.”

Becket’s autobiography, “To Dance on Sands,” was published in 2006.

PHOTOS BY SAM MORRIS/THE LAS VEGAS SUN Marta Becket was a performance artist who spent decades presenting one-woman shows at the remote Amargosa Opera House, a former community hall in Death Valley Junction, Calif.

Becket dances during the inaugural performance of “Masquerade” at the Amargosa Opera House in 2005.