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No, sorry, shit: In Hanover, the dance director physically attacks a theater critic. Has the relationship between art and criticism gone to the dogs? Answers to the gossip piece of the hour.
What happened? Caution, disgusting: Marco Goecke, ballet director of the Hanover State Opera, is said to have smeared Wiebke Hüster, theater critic for the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung”, with dog excrement. The State Theater confirmed the incident, which is said to have happened on Saturday during the first premiere break of the new ballet evening “Faith – Love – Hope”. Goecke is facing criminal charges.
On Monday afternoon, the Hanover State Theater acted: it suspended Goecke with immediate effect and banned him from entering the building until further notice, “to protect the ballet ensemble and state theater from further damage”.
Why so violent? FAZ–Feder Hüster put it on record that ballet master Goecke had told her before the “shit attack” that, well, her performance criticism, disguised as personal attacks, rankled him. That doesn’t seem completely out of thin air, as a look in the “mirror” shows: Hüster, one can read there, recently wrote about a Goecke evening in The Hague that the audience would “alternately mad and dying of boredom». The whole piece is “a disgrace and cheek, and you have to blame the choreographer (…) for both”.
Has anything like this ever happened? Certainly not that crude and drastic. SRF theater critic Andreas Klaeui recalls the not house-clean words from the mouth of Hamburg’s theater director Karen Beier, criticism is “shit on the sleeve of art, there is not much more left at the end”. The “spiral block affair” also caused waves: in 2006, actor Thomas Lawinky snatched the notes from a FAZ critic after an Ionesco production. As a result, a debate broke out in the arts pages about how theater criticism sees itself.
How does the media react to the attack? Firm but factual. Frank Rieger, chairman of the German Association of Journalists in Lower Saxony, called for “a clear reaction from those responsible” in a tweet. An artist has to endure criticism, even if it may seem exaggerated.
For the theater critic Tobi Müller, the dog excrement complex shows that the nerves are on edge on both sides. It is not only in Germany that state theaters are under pressure to save – and the media companies are not doing any better. This increases the volume and sharpens the sound.
What is the relationship between art and criticism in Switzerland? Fisticuffs with dog excrement or type-similar excrement excesses are not on record to date. Critic Klaeui, however, recalls the violent attack by the Belgian Benny Claessens on the journalist Valeria Heintges at the Neumarkt Theater (“Your time is over, baby”). Nicolas Stemann and Benjamin von Blomberg, the outgoing artistic director duo at the Zurich Schauspielhaus, blame the media for the poor capacity utilization of the house, which criticized their theater work as “woken madness” (NZZ).
However, Andreas Klaeui has made the experience that if criticism doesn’t make things too easy for itself and builds on arguments, it rarely gets the wrong way with artists. Even if a piece went haywire.
Created with material from the dpa agency.