An award-winning German ballet company director who smeared his dog’s faeces on the face of a dance critic has failed to apologise, saying he was responding to decades of “annihilatory criticism”.
Marco Goecke admitted in an interview with the broadcaster NDR that his “means of attack” was “certainly not super” but said he had acted on impulse on seeing the journalist, Wiebke Hüster.
Goecke, the 2022 winner of the German dance prize, is being investigated by police on charges of criminal assault and has been suspended from his post as head of Hanover State Opera’s ballet company and barred from entering the opera house.
There has been wave of condemnation of the incident. The theatre in northern Germany, where Goecke has worked since 2019, urged him to issue an apology and to explain his actions to the management, saying he had caused “massive damage” to its reputation and “deeply offended” Hüster.
Meanwhile, Leander Haussmann, a leading film and theatre director, told NDR Kultur: “Here is a colleague who has stumbled over his own sense of importance. This is an offence. And if he does not ask for forgiveness then he no longer has a place in our ranks; he’s no longer an artist. We are about being human, a moral institution, we don’t do anything like this, even in the name of art, and he will not receive any support.”
Falko Mohrs, the minister for science and culture in the state of Lower Saxony, where Hanover is located, said the incident was unjustifiable. “Everyone has to be able to deal with criticism,” he said. “To use violence and attack someone is simply inexcusable and unacceptable.”
Police are relying on witness accounts owing to the fact that Goecke disposed of the dog excrement and Hüster cleaned her face immediately afterwards.
Goecke and Hüster both reported that they met for the first time during the interval of Goecke’s latest production on Saturday evening. Goecke said he confronted Hüster and wanted to speak to her about her critique of his recent production with the Netherlands Dance Theatre in The Hague. Hüster, who has been the dance critic at the Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper for about two decades, had called the production “boring” and “disjointed” in her report.
“I told her ‘I’m a human’,” he said in the NDR interview, describing her reaction as “aggressive, arrogant and condescending”. He admitted to then smearing her face with his dog’s excrement, saying it was not premeditated but that he acted “in the heat of the moment”.
He said: “My old dachshund had done his business in his bag, which sometimes happens at the age he is, and I had just packed the poo into a bag and had wanted to throw it away outside.”
Hüster, in her version of events, said Goecke approached her in the crowded foyer and blocked her path, telling her she should be banned from entering the theatre as she always wrote negative reviews of his productions.
“I told him ‘no, that’s not true, there are productions of yours that I’ve cherished a lot. It’s not true,’” she said. “Then all of a sudden he pulled this bag from his pocket. With the open side of the bag, he rubbed the dog excrement into my face. When I felt what he had done, I screamed. I was in panic.”
People around her were stunned into silence, she said. One woman told her later how she had pursued Goecke through the foyer. “She tried to get help and get hold of the man, but someone from the theatre came and led Marco Goecke to a separate room,” she said.
Goecke said he regretted the incident but he did not offer an apology. “I think that the means I chose were certainly not super. Absolutely. I think from a societal viewpoint, making use of such a method will not receive approval or be respected,” he said, sitting on a park bench accompanied by his 14-year-old dog, Gustav.
He added: “I am also a human who has never done anything like that, and in this respect I am of course a bit shocked at myself. And the method I used was certainly not good.”
Gustav is a personality in his own right, accompanying Goecke everywhere. The dog inspired his 2019 production with the Paris Opera, Dogs Sleep.
Goecke appeared to try to justify the attack by suggesting that in its scatological nature it was like-for-like revenge for what he described as years of negative criticism.
“She threw shit at me for over 20 years. And at some point I asked myself the question whether I want that, how would other people react who work hard, having dirt thrown at them over such a long timeframe. I don’t think any hard-working person would put up with that for any length of time,” he said.
Hüster said in an interview with the BBC that she was shocked to hear from colleagues that Goecke was allowed to give a bow at the end of the evening’s performance, “acting as if nothing had happened”.
She called the incident, which she believed to have been premeditated, an “attack against the freedom of the press”.
