Ballet is a silent sport. Onstage, dancers are voiceless; offstage; they are often voiceless due to complex internal politics. In a rare publicity video for the American Ballet Theatre, the ballerina Diana Vishneva offered a more poetic angle on this silence: “The things that can be expressed by ballet are almost impossible to express by any other means.”
In rehearsal, a ballerina sees wall-to-wall mirrors. Onstage, wall-to-wall spectators. In her mind, a bombardment of corrections. Sitting down to rest, she finds parasocial fans in the wings of her digital stage. There is immense pressure to cultivate a public persona and generate a following. Online fame offers moon shots at auditions, but how can an artist keep her own counsel before all these audiences?
Perhaps this is why the unusual story of the dancer Marta Becket has attracted so much attention, even after her death. Becket (1924 –2017) devised a theater in which the self would be the only spectator. As the story goes, Marta was crossing the country with her husband when they made a spontaneous pitstop in a California ghost town. Once a company town for borax miners, Death Valley Junction had just three residents by the time Marta peered into the deserted social hall. She was charmed and decided to stay.
Marta rented the 127-seat theater and named it Amargosa Opera House, after the bitter Spanish gentian that grew nearby. On the walls she painted characters from the Middle Ages: jesters, monks, nuns. In Marta’s obituary in the New York Times, Richard Sandomir called the characters “a colorful audience that would never leave.” Into her eighties, Marta choreographed and performed nightly ballets, defying the unspoken rule that youth is essential to classical dance. She choreographed the ballets, played the lead, and designed the sets and costumes. Through her self-possession, Marta found a way to dance honestly. At first, she danced for the walls. Later, she drew real crowds.
Marta’s story has been widely reported by The New York Times and National Geographic, and was the subject of the 2000 documentary Amargosa. Now it animates a work of fiction. Bitter Water Opera, a new novel by Nicolette Polek, tells the story of Gia, a depressed academic who writes a letter to the ghost of Marta Becket. To her surprise, Marta appears and moves into her house. The novel narrates the ensuing weeks that jolt Gia awake, lift her depression, and bring her to the Amargosa Opera House.
Polek is well poised to sketch Marta’s world. A graduate of Bennington College— renowned for its modern dance program that was once home to Martha Graham— and Yale Divinity School, Polek is attuned to the grand spiritual feelings that moved Marta and heal Gia. She lives in a cottage in upstate New York and is no stranger to remote places. Her luminous prose feels freshly scrubbed clean—perfect to capture the emptiness of the desert:
“The desert was occupied by alfalfa and ostrich farms, wild horses, mesquite beans, and wind. Marta hated the wind for how it made emptiness emptier. They purchased lawn chairs and corduroy curtains, turned coffee cans into theater lights. Marta’s aloneness became something more permanent. She saw herself mirrored in the discarded buildings and the stray cats in town.”
At the outset of the novel, Marta Becket has been dead for years. The protagonist, Gia, is floundering from a breakup and on hiatus from her job in a college film department.
After watching the documentary Amargosa, Gia decides to write a letter to the late Marta Becket. In response, Marta’s ghost quietly moves into Gia’s house. In a strange atmosphere of unspoken affection, the women live together for a few weeks. They paint an Amargosa-style mural in Gia’s garage, cook decadent meals, and watch ballet movies like The Red Shoes. In her focus on these simple pleasures, Polek seems to suggest that daily joys can solve spiritual ills.
Roused by Marta’s presence, Gia recovers her energy. When Marta leaves mysteriously, Gia travels alone to Death Valley Junction. Before Marta moved in, a trip to the supermarket could induce agony in Gia. She felt stalked, uncertain of what to buy, what to do. After Marta leaves, Gia feels more stable and receptive. Gia’s affect remains flat but she gains the strength to search for answers and overcome old obstacles. Her transformation from rumination to action offers one answer to Polek’s question, “How do we look beyond ourselves?”
The narrator’s ambiguous depression and fixation on her own numbness might recall for some readers Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation or Sheila Heti’s Motherhood. What sets Polek apart is her refusal to wallow in elegant prose. Her true accomplishment is her restless search for answers. A moral quality glows from her book; the source is Polek’s relationship to God, her sincere preoccupation with questions of how to live.
Looking out at Zabriskie Point, Gia is overtaken by the divine beauty of the desert. A gorgeous passage follows: “God’s touch! Everything else in comparison was gray-washed. The mycelium of heaven, beneath everything, making small plush things grow from din.” Throughout the novel, Polek’s writing soars with poetry. She avoids gerunds and other awkward or unresolved forms. Her prose is precise, rhythmic, and assured. Every sentence reflects the divine beauty of the desert landscape.
After this religious awakening at Zabriskie Point, Gia is surprised to remember that during her visit, she hadn’t once thought of the Michelangelo Antonioni film of the same name. In her old life as a film studies professor, this would have been second nature. She feels free from the conventions of her former vocation. With pleasure, she realizes, “My pursuits had always revolved around representations of life instead of life itself. It seemed to be a good sign that I saw a place for what it was.”
Polek’s achievement is to create a character in a real spiritual crisis, and then guide her out. Opera brings its reader into a nervous and sad mind that has temporarily lost access to the jolts of imagination and impulse that guide art into being. Through Gia’s recovery, Polek suggests a refreshingly simple remedy: the spiritual medicine of looking after your neighbors, tending a garden, spending time with family, and cleaning your house. The answers to the big questions are small. Cook a nice meal, take a walk, watch an old film. Inhabit your life instead of observing it.
Today, the Amargosa Opera House is a museum. Like many historic sites in America, it faces an uncertain future due to low funds. As much as Polek reveres Becket, she isn’t sentimental about the Amargosa. She understands from Becket’s biography that the theater was a source of anguish as well as freedom. As Gia wanders around the Opera House, she meets a group of preservationists who steward the site. They caution her against celebrating the past. They are repulsed by the tendency to obsess over broken things. Polek’s relationship with Becket could be seen as one such obsession. But Gia rejects the backward glance. In the triumphant last line of the novel, she steadies herself in the present: “I sing out; I’m here.”
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