Marco Goecke with his beloved ‘poo’pertrator, Gustav
(Picture: Franco-Jennewein)No one likes criticism, even if it’s constructive, as most people’s egos react badly to it. Typically, this manifests as a grimaced smile and reluctantly eked “no worries”. But for Marco Goecke, the head of Hanover State Opera’s ballet company, he chose a rather extreme measure.
In retaliation to one particularly damning review that called his upcoming opera, In the Dutch Mountain, as “boring” and “disjointed”, the aggrieved Goecke decided to smear dog poo on the critic behind it.
Last Saturday, Wiebke Hüster, the ballet critic of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), wrote, “One alternates between a state of feeling insane and being killed by boredom,” about Goecke’s new show in the FAZ newspaper. She also compared the experience of watching it to passively looking at the sea from “behind a glass, left to sit in the warm, looking at a winter beach, like in a permanent state of retirement”, which seriously aggravated Goecke.
Upon seeing Hüster during the interval of another show, Faith - Love - Hope, which was premiering later that evening, the German director threatened to ban her from entering the opera house, as well as accusing her of being responsible for theatregoers cancelling their membership subscriptions. He then defiled the critic with his dog’s poo in the attack. According to German media his pet dachshund, Gustav (who is famous in his own right), always accompanies Goecke everywhere and Gustav had produced the excrement only minutes earlier.
Hüster later recounted the incident, saying that Goecke had “suddenly pulled the bag from his pocket. With the open side of the bag, he rubbed the dog excrement in my face. When I felt what he had done, I screamed.”
Immediately afterwards, a member of the opera house’s press office immediately cleaned Hüster’s face in a nearby bathroom, before Hüster then drove to a police station in central Hanover, where she reported the assault.
Since then, there’s been an outpouring of disgust. The Lower Saxony chair of the Association of German Journalists, Frank Rieger, said the attack was “nothing less than an attack on press freedom”. Moreover, an editorial in FAZ described it as a “horrendous incident” and an “attempt at intimidation towards our free, critical artistic appreciation… The incident shows in its appalling method of physical violence what is often thought and said in artistic circles about criticism and critics.”
As a result, the director has been suspended from his post while the opera house’s artistic director, Laura Berman, offered her apologies. “Immediately after the episode, we sought to contact the journalist and to apologise to her personally and also in public,” Berman said, before adding that the management would “explore the relevant steps relating to labour law with respect to ballet director Marco Goecke, jointly confer and then act in this internal staff matter”.
But what is Goecke’s response to all this, you might be wondering? After initially refusing to apologise, saying that his work had been soiled by the journalist for years, the ballet head has now publically apoogised. “I would like to apologise sincerely to all concerned, first and foremost to Ms Huester, for my absolutely unacceptable act.
“In retrospect, I am clearly aware that this was a disgraceful act in the heat of the moment and an overreaction,” he added.
But he said that it is time for the media to “rethink a certain form of destructive and hurtful reporting that damages the whole cultural sector” and criticised Ms Huester for what he described as “often nasty reviews”. He also said he had been under “nervous strain” at the time.
The critic’s response? “What kind of an apology is this supposed to be?” she asked on 3sat television.
It’s a huge fall from grace from the acclaimed ballet director, who was once invited to dine with Princess Caroline of Monaco in Paris and won the German Dance Prize only last year.
Born in Wuppertal, Germany, Goecke trained as a dancer at the Heinz-Bosl-Stiftung in Munich, as well as the Royal Conservatory of The Hague. After graduating in 1995, he went on to work at the Deutsche Staatsoper Berlin and at the Theater Hagen. By 2006 the international press, including newspapers Ballet and Tanz, were proclaiming Goecke to be the new great choreographic talent. Later that same year, Goecke even won the Nijinsky Award in Monaco for the most promising and outstanding choreographer in the international dance field, and a year later he was nominated for the Deutsche Theaterpreis.
He has since created more than 60 works for the likes of The Hamburg Ballet, Leipziger Ballett, Nederlands Dans Theater, Norwegian National Ballet, Pacific Northwest Ballet, Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo, The Berlin State Ballet, São Paulo Companhia de Dança, and Ballet Zürich, and is regarded as one of the most acclaimed choreographers of the moment in the international dance world.
The Scapino Ballet Rotterdam has described his choreography as “sensationally idiosyncratic and innovative. In a dark atmosphere, full of suggestion and magic, he touches the spectator deep inside with absurdist – and never-before-seen dance.” For example, his last creation for Nederlands Dans Theater, Hello Earth, saw his dancers perform on popcorn.
“Dancing his choreographies is like learning Chinese. With Marco, you’re constantly pushing up against your own boundaries. You’re forced to extremes,” Rein Putkamer, a dancer at Scapino Ballet, has said of working with the director.
“Being overwhelmed with love, anxiety, and pain — that is Wir Sagen uns Dunkles [Dark Things We Tell Each Other] for me. The piece's emotions are so strong that you become breathless, yet your body spills out its most raw contents faster than you can think. They can be painful and filled with a tender loneliness. To be in Marco's world means to battle with darkness and profound light; a duality that leaves you melancholic and deeply moved,” another dancer at NDT, Toon Lobach, says.
Raw emotions are fine, using dog poo as a weapon? Not so much.
