Ballet director punishes critic for bad review with dog excrement

High art turned out to be smeared with a foul-smelling scandal

The art of ballet, which is patronized by the muse of Terpsichore, found itself in Germany at the center of a foul-smelling – in the truest sense of the word – scandal. German ballet director smeared dog excrement on critic’s face after a bad review.

The director of Germany’s leading ballet company has been suspended and is under police investigation after he allegedly smeared the critic’s face with his own dog’s feces at the premiere of his new show after she called one of his productions “boring” and “incoherent.”

According to The Guardian, Hannover State Opera ballet director Marco Gecke has also been banned from the opera house, a spokesman confirmed Monday afternoon, after he ran into Wibke Hüster, ballet critic for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), during a break during his last show on Sunday night.

The artist first verbally attacked the lady critic, and then pulled out a bag of dog excrement from his pocket and began to try to rub the foul-smelling contents into her face, the critic herself told FAZ.

The newspaper said in a statement that Gekke expressed his fury at Wibke Huster’s review, published on Saturday in FAZ, of his production of “In the Dutch Mountain” at the Nederlands Dans theater in The Hague.

Hooster wrote, “Watching the play alternately feels mad and bored,” and compared watching the performance to passively watching the sea “behind the glass, sitting warm, gazing at the wintry beach as if in a constant state of solitude.” .

Gekke, 50, who studied at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague, has been director of the Hannover Ballet Company since 2019. His domestic dachshund Gustav accompanies him – he once dined in Paris with Princess Caroline of Monegasque, who is known to be a fan of the breed.

German media reported that the feces in the bag used in the alleged attack had been “manufactured” by Gustav just minutes before.

Gekke threatened to ban critics from attending the opera house during the Sunday intermission and accused her of being responsible for theater-goers canceling their memberships.

Hooster later recounted the incident, saying that Gekke “suddenly pulled a package out of his pocket. With the open side of the bag, he rubbed dog excrement into my face. When I felt what he did, I screamed.”

An employee of the press service of the opera house helped the frustrated Huster to wash herself in a nearby restroom. The victim then went to the police station in the center of Hannover, where she reported the incident.

Opera house artistic director Laura Berman apologized to Wibke Huster and said on Sunday she was investigating the incident before deciding what steps to take.

“Immediately after this episode, we tried to contact the journalist and apologize to her personally, as well as publicly,” Berman said. She described the opera house as “an open place of respectful collaboration and exchange”, adding that the management “will study the appropriate steps regarding the labor law regarding the director of the ballet Marco Gecke, confer together and then take action on this internal staffing issue.”

The chairman of the Association of German Journalists of Lower Saxony, Frank Rieger, condemned the alleged attack as “nothing less than an infringement on the freedom of the press.” An editorial in FAZ described the incident as “a horrific incident” and “an attempt to intimidate our free critical artistic appreciation.”…This incident, with its horrific method of physical abuse, demonstrates what is often thought and said in artistic circles about criticism and criticizing faces.”