Ballet director suspended after dog poo attack on critic

Marco Goecke accused of assaulting reviewer who said his work would make audiences ‘die from boredom’

Marco Goecke and Jean-Christophe Maillot
Marco Goecke (R) is one of Germany’s best-known choreographers
(Image credit: Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images)

The head of Hanover State Opera’s ballet company has been suspended after allegedly smearing dog excrement into the face of a dance critic who slated one of his shows.

Marco Goecke allegedly confronted and verbally abused reviewer Wiebke Hüster on Saturday during the premiere of another ballet that he choreographed, Glaube-Liebe-Hoffnung (Faith-Love-Hope). He then “pulled out a paper bag with animal faeces and mauled the face of our dance critic with the contents”, according to Hüster’s employer, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ).

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Jamie Timson is the UK news editor, curating The Week UK's daily morning newsletter and setting the agenda for the day's news output. He was first a member of the team from 2015 to 2019, progressing from intern to senior staff writer, and then rejoined in September 2022. As a founding panellist on “The Week Unwrapped” podcast, he has discussed politics, foreign affairs and conspiracy theories, sometimes separately, sometimes all at once. In between working at The Week, Jamie was a senior press officer at the Department for Transport, with a penchant for crisis communications, working on Brexit, the response to Covid-19 and HS2, among others.