As John Lennon once sang, “I read the news today, oh boy.”
Last week, Marco Goecke, the ballet director of the Hanover State Theatre, approached the dance critic Wiebke Hüster during an intermission and smeared his dog’s feces over her face. He was responding to her review of his latest creation, In the Dutch Mountains, which had been published that morning in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the newspaper for which Hüster has written for about 20 years. The review declared, in part, that “One alternates between a state of feeling insane and being killed by boredom.”
The Hanover State Theatre quickly suspended Goecke; he has now lost his job. Initially, he refused to apologize, claiming he had endured years of “annihilatory criticism.” Several days later, his statement to CNN included an apology for his “absolutely unacceptable action.”
That’s a précis of the events, as reported by various news sources that can easily be found online. I can’t tell you any more about it. I wasn’t there. I’ve never seen Goecke’s choreography. I don’t read German.
Hüster has described the confrontation as an “attack against the freedom of the press,” and many of the reactions to it, understandably, address that subject. But there’s something else about it that interests me, not the interaction between the critic and the artist but the one between the critic and the audience.
Decades ago, a dance critic who worked for the New York Times told me his responsibility was to inform, educate and entertain. Some years later, the arts editor of a British broadsheet told me that she wanted to fill the arts pages with the critics’ opinions. Both comments came back to me as Goecke’s story broke, and I’ve been trying to understand how they fit into it.
No one now pays much attention to the distinction between criticism and opinion, though it seems to me an important one. If during a performance I whisper to a friend, “She’s the most amazing Giselle,” my opinion only reveals something about me. Like everyone, critics express their opinions in private all the time.
With their colleagues and other professionals in their field, they often pool their subjective views for fun, combining bits of personal experience and knowledge in a conversational shorthand that would make no sense to anyone else. Among themselves, dance writers argue about performers omitting choreographic details, about musical tempi, about misguided casting and missed cues.
Some critics transport the minutia of this shared language into their reviews, naming individual steps—in French, for ballet—and fondly remembered artists whose artistry the current readers may never have seen. These critics essentially write for each other—no wonder many viewers respond to a performance defensively, saying, “I don’t know anything about dance, but…”
To make life easy for readers whose interest is limited and attention span short, writers sprinkle stars around as if performances were hotels or dishwashers with fixed attributes that could be rated. It’s a cheap and cheerful way to sum up the occasion, and though every critic has the opportunity to “inform, educate and entertain,” it’s hard to gauge what the readers might know or want to know.
But isn’t it our job to distinguish each dance and dancer by the qualities that might make them interesting for you? There’s no point writing simply “She’s an amazing Giselle” when I could add “because” and tell you that she’s blind and learned the role on her fingers, while confined to bed, by recalling the performances she’d once been able to see.
Why would a certain work engage you? Because it challenges the dancers to stretch their abilities. Or because it preserves an ancient tradition. Or because it makes you laugh. The literary critic Harold Bloom maintained that “the finest critics…tell one why it matters to read.” Dance critics enjoy the privilege of telling you why dance matters.
I once described to my editor a dance so boring that I thought it might not be worth reviewing. “The fact that you were bored,” she replied, “has nothing to do with criticism. I have no idea of your threshold of boredom, and it’s irrelevant anyway. ‘Boring’ tells me nothing about the dance.”
As I said, I couldn’t read Hüstler’s remarks about In the Dutch Mountains, so I don’t know whether they contain the reasons for her boredom. I hope she explained why that ballet could drive viewers insane. They deserve to know, and so does Goecke.
This is a very good reflexion on this case. I agree. I have seen the premiere by NDT in The Hague.
I enjoyed the choreo a lot and it was not boring for a second!
This weekend the complete ballet In the Dutch Mountains will be to see as streaming video on demand. Look at ndt.nl. I will enjoy it, for sure.
May I suggest that more critics need to read this thoughtful article?!