An award-winning German ballet company director who smeared his dog’s faeces on the face of a dance critic has failed to apologise, saying he was responding to decades of “annihilatory criticism”.
Marco Goecke admitted in an interview with the broadcaster NDR that his “means of attack” was “certainly not super” but said he had acted on impulse on seeing the journalist, Wiebke Hüster.
Goecke, the 2022 winner of the German dance prize, is being investigated by police on charges of criminal assault and has been suspended from his post as head of Hanover State Opera’s ballet company and barred from entering the opera house.
There has been wave of condemnation of the incident. The theatre in northern Germany, where Goecke has worked since 2019, urged him to issue an apology and to explain his actions to the management, saying he had caused “massive damage” to its reputation and “deeply offended” Hüster.
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