Hanover State Opera ends contract with ballet director over dog faeces incident

A leading German ballet choreographer who smeared dog faeces into the face of a dance critic in revenge for her negative reviews of his work has been sacked from his post, the Hanover State Opera said on Thursday.

It said Marco Goecke’s actions last weekend in confronting Wiebke Hüster, a journalist with the Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper, had been hugely damaging to its reputation.

It had suspended Goecke, 50, on Monday, and police are investigating after Hüster reported the incident to them.

“Marco Goecke’s irresponsible actions have deeply unsettled the audience, irritated the public, violated all the principles of the house and massively damaged the reputation of the Hanover state opera,” the theatre’s statement read.

Hüster has said she cried out and burst into tears upon realising what Goecke had done, and she believes it was a meditated attack. She said she was shocked a second time when Goecke initially refused to apologise.

Instead, in a television interview, he expressed his regret for the attack, describing “the manner of it” as “certainly not super” and admitting it would not be viewed as socially acceptable. But he called it a “heat of the moment” response on seeing Hüster, whom he accused of having “throwing mud” at him over more than 20 years of negative reviews of his work.

Under pressure, he later issued what was widely interpreted as a half-hearted written apology. He wrote: “I want to sincerely apologise to all involved, first and foremost Frau Hüster, for my absolutely not to be applauded action.” He said the attack had been the result of “nervous overload due to two premieres that followed each other closely”.

But in the same statement he made further accusations towards the journalist and spoke of the “often hateful critiques” he was subjected to.

Hüster has denied his accusation that she had been set on rubbishing all his performances, saying she had “cherished” a lot of his work. But she vowed to never attend another Goecke production.

The Hanover opera’s head, Laura Berman, said its contract with Goecke, a celebrated, prize-winning choreographer, would be dissolved with immediate effect by mutual agreement, but he would be permitted access to the premises for the time being and his productions would continue to be staged by the theatre.

Goecke, in his explanation, poured scorn on the critics of German newspapers, in particular of the feuilleton or feature sections of the highbrow broadsheets, urging them to refrain from negative publicity of the cultural world, which he said was not helpful to theatres struggling to get back on their feet after the pandemic.

In the most recent criticism of his work to which Goecke had taken exception, on a collaboration with the the Netherlands Dance Theatre in The Hague, Hüster had said it was like a badly tuned radio. She wrote: “One alternates between a state of feeling insane and being killed by boredom,” and she compared the experience of watching the performance to viewing a warm winter beach from a glass window, “as if in a permanent state of retirement”.

She said his apology had been anything but. “He immediately switched into strengthening the accusations that he had previously held against me. What sort of an apology is that? That is a justification. In addition: we’re talking here about a criminal act. Of insult and bodily harm.”