Receiving negative criticism of a show is never usually to the author's liking, but there is no choice but to accept them if you do not want to exceed limits, as Marco Goecke, a prestigious German ballet director, did last weekend.
The choreographer has been fired from his position as director of the Hannover Opera dance company after he rubbed dog poop in the face of a journalist from the Frankfurter AllgemeineZeitung (FAZ) newspaper. Apparently Goecke was enraged by Wiebke Hürster's negative opinion of his earlier work.
“Watching her, one feels alternately mad and bored to death,” he had written about In the Dutch Mountains, one of the choreographies he created for the Nederlands Dans Theater, the national dance company of the Netherlands.
The incident happened on Saturday afternoon, when during the intermission of the Fe-Love-Hope ballet premiere, he went to the lobby to look for the journalist. She asked him what she was doing in the play and blamed him for criticizing her. Immediately after, she opened a bag with dog feces and rubbed it all over his face. He left without anyone stopping him.
The woman was attended to by the Hannover theater press spokeswoman, who took her to the bathroom to wash up and then accompanied her to the police station to file a complaint. "When I realized what I had done I started screaming," Hürster said. The German newspaper describes this act as "humiliating physical aggression" and an attempt to curtail the "freedom of art criticism".
Goecke was at the time accompanied by his dachshund Gustav, whom he usually takes with him to all performances. He is under investigation for alleged assault.
Laura Berman, director of the Hannover Opera, assures that she apologized to the critics and this Monday they decided to expel Goecke. Frank Rieger, president of the German Lower Saxony Association of Journalists, called it an "attack on press freedom."
