When the German choreographer Marco Goecke bumped into a dance critic in 2023 shortly after she had savaged his work, he took out his anger on her by smearing feces from his dachshund, Gustav, on her face.
That incident, at the Hanover State Opera, prompted an immediate reckoning for Goecke, who was then the company’s ballet director. After a police investigation, he paid a fine of 5,000 euros (about $5,800) and lost his job.
Now, Goecke is back, as the artistic director of Ballet Basel, one of Switzerland’s major dance companies. That means critics are once again part of his working life and sizing up his productions, like a new “Nutcracker,” which premiered Saturday and runs through March 27.
So far, they appear to be assessing his choreography and not his past. Dorion Weickmann, writing in the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, described Goecke’s stark take on the holiday classic, with a bare stage design, as a “persuasive reworking of a classic.” Lilo Weber, in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, a Swiss outlet, said that the show “may not appeal” to traditionalists, but that audiences could find “great pleasure” in the “fabulous, extremely precise” dancing.
Manuel Brug, a dance critic for Die Welt newspaper, said in an interview that most critics would put the excrement episode aside when assessing the choreographer’s performances. Goecke was “too good” an artist to dismiss for one aberrant action, Brug added.
Still, some haven’t forgotten. This summer, Arifa Akbar, a British theater critic, presented a BBC radio series that discussed whether Goecke’s actions illustrated “the waning power and authority” of criticism generally.
For more than a decade before the incident, Goecke had made a name for himself with productions in which dancers make hectic but exact movements. Brug has likened Goecke’s dancers in motion to “flying birds.”
Goecke’s work was respected enough that after the dog feces incident, many companies, including the Nederlands Dans Theater, where he is an associate choreographer, continued performing his pieces.
Laura Berman, who was the Hanover State Opera’s artistic director when the episode occurred, said she wasn’t surprised that companies kept staging his productions. “In the dance world, there aren’t zillions of people at his level,” Berman said. “That’s why I hired him in the first place.”
She called Goecke’s behavior in the 2023 incident “inexcusable” and said that bystanders had feared that he might attack them, too. But Berman said that Goecke had apologized and also told her that he had undertaken media coaching to help improve interactions with journalists.
Benedikt von Peter, the artistic director of Theater Basel, which oversees the ballet company, said in an interview that he had hired Goecke after a lengthy process in which the theater investigated the fecal incident. Goecke had burnout at the time, von Peter said, adding, “A person deserves a second chance.”
The theater declined an interview request with Goecke for this article. Von Peter said that most journalists just “want to talk about him as this scandal person or a weirdo, and this is not so interesting for a person who wants to talk about his work.”
Wiebke Hüster, the critic Goecke attacked, said in an interview that she knew “the day would come when he’d be a ballet director again” and that she planned to avoid traveling to Basel. “I feel, ‘They have to work with the guy, I don’t,’” she said. “It’s everybody’s choice.”
Since Goecke took up his new position in the summer, he hasn’t quite avoided controversy. In September, he annoyed some ballet fans there when he told Süddeutsche Zeitung that the media reaction to the 2023 incident had made him “more famous than ever,” and provocatively claimed that he would sell his mother “to a men’s prison in Istanbul” in exchange for a headline calling him “the coolest German since Marlene Dietrich.”
Von Peter said that Goecke had known the interviewer for a long time, and that he was simply joking around.
Soon afterward, an opinion article in the Basler Zeitung, Basel’s major newspaper, argued that Goecke had blown his second chance. “Basel doesn’t need a ballet director who makes such questionable remarks,” the article said.
Some dance fans in Basel share the newspaper’s concerns. Ruth Klein, 75, who was in the audience for the “Nutcracker” premiere, called Goecke “very strange” and his recent comments “crazy.” She hadn’t liked his “Nutcracker” either, she said: The plot was hard to follow, and the dancers’ movements were hyperactive. Several people left during the intermission, she added.
“Either you like his style of dance or you don’t,” Klein said: “I don’t.”
Despite the recent furor, Goecke’s topsy-turvy relationship with critics appears to be on an upswing.
Jessica Schön, reviewing the new “Nutcracker” for the Basler Zeitung, praised Goecke’s “sometimes grotesque, but strangely beautiful visual style.” His tenure in Basel may be controversial because of the dog poop, Schön said, but that “does not change the fact that the audience greeted the premiere with thunderous applause and standing ovations.”
Alex Marshall is a Times reporter covering European culture. He is based in London.
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