BERLIN- A German ballet director smeared feces in the face of a newspaper critic after he was apparently offended by a review she had written.
The Hanover State Opera apologized for the incident and announced on Monday that it had immediately suspended ballet director Marco Goecke.
As the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported, Goecke approached the dance critic Wiebke Huester during the break of a premiere at the Hanover Opera House on Saturday and asked her what she was doing there. According to the newspaper, they did not know each other personally.
Goecke, apparently provoked by Huester’s recent criticism of a production he was staging in the Dutch seat of government The Hague, threatened the newspaper that it had threatened to ban the ballet and accused it of being responsible for season ticket cancellations in Hanover.
He then took out a paper bag of animal feces and smeared it on his face.said the newspaper. Huester filed a criminal complaint, the German news agency dpa reported.
In a statement on its website, the opera house said Huester’s “personal integrity” had been violated “in an unspeakable way”. He added that he contacted her immediately after the incident to apologize.
Goecke’s “impulsive reaction” violated the basic rules of the theater and “had massive damage to the State Opera and the State Ballet in Hanover”. As a result, he was suspended and was banned from opera until further notice.
Goecke will have time in the next few days to “comprehensively” apologize to the theater management and explain “before further steps are taken,” the theater added.